When Moby-Duck author, Donovan Hohn, heard about the mysterious loss of 28,800 bath toys at sea, he figured he would interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers and read up on Arctic science and geography. Little did he know that he would be pulled into the mixed-up worlds of renegade beachcombers, Alaskan non-profit politics, Chinese toy manufacturers, and a massive environmental problem.

Moby-Duck reveals the huge amount of plastic pollution in our oceans. A core vision at CEC is choosing ‘eco-smart products’ to help minimize our fossil fuel consumption. Plastics are among the most fossil fuel intensive products being manufactured today. Single use plastic bags and water bottles are used for a very short time but the environmental impacts can last for decades, particularly when they end up in our oceans. You can help stem this tide by bringing your own bags whenever you shop and carrying reusable water bottles and coffee cups.

The “UCSB Reads” program is promoting Moby-Duck on campus and has given away over 2,000 copies. “Santa Barbara Reads” is also featuring the book in the city’s library branches. Local universities and libraries are organizing activities designed to expand readers’ understanding of the book and the questions it raises.

The Community Environmental Council is proud to be included in upcoming panel discussions about the effects of plastic pollution and what we can do to help reverse the trend. The program culminates on Monday, March 5 at UCSB’s Campbell Hall with a lecture featuring the book’s author. Local libraries are stocked up with several copies of the book so check one out and join the conversation!

Schedule of events:

• SBCC Library: Wednesday, February 15 at 3pm*
• Montecito Library: Wednesday, February 15 at 6pm
• Solvang Library: Thursday, February 16 at 6pm
• Carpinteria Library: Tuesday, February 21 at 6pm*
• UCSB Davidson Library: Wednesday, February 22 at noon*
• Goleta Library: Tuesday, February 28 at 6pm
• Central Library: Wednesday, February 29 at 6pm
• Eastside Library: Saturday, March 3 at 11am
• Campbell Hall, UCSB: Monday, March 5 at 8pm, author lecture (free)

*CEC present on discussion panel

You don’t have to read the book before attending an event! For more information go to www.sbplibrary.org.

Bottled water is energy intensive

One way to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels is to reduce usage of products that are energy intensive to produce, like bottled water. The amount of oil used to produce and transport bottled water in the USA is enough to fuel 1.5 million cars for a year. Millions of bottles are sent to landfills every day for a product that costs 1,000x more than what comes out of the tap for free.

The good news is that "hydration" stations are popping up in Santa Barbara through the Rethink the Drink project and they are appearing in airports, parks, office buildings and colleges across the country (read an article from USA Today).

Change in Santa Barbara

Rethink the Drink is a project of the Community Environmental Council, funded primarily by the Orfalea Foundations and their s'Cool Food Initiative. Last year's pilot project installed refill "hydration" stations to Santa Barbara High School and Franklin Elementary, as well as Santa Barbara Junior High, the Westmont College Gym and Montecito Union Elementary (through corporate and private partnerships).

The refill stations provide cold, filtered water either from a regular water fountain spout or a refill mechanism that fills reusable bottles quickly. The stations have a "counter" that reflects the number of uses, effectively showing the number of plastic bottles not being used by opting to refill.

Last school year, Franklin Elementary's plastic bottle usage dropped more than 80% in the first two months of Rethink the Drink implementation. The stations were met with enthusiasm at all locations during the pilot; they were used cumulatively more than 46,000 times during their first four months of operation!

Stainless steel canteens were given to all students and staff at Franklin and donated to the Dons Net Café student marketing group at SBHS for their student store. The Dons Net Café also helped to establish a baseline of bottled water usage prior to refill station installations and continues to serve as a "go-to" group for photo shoots and school outreach.

Project Renewal

We are so pleased to announce that project has been renewed for a second year with generous support from the Orfalea Foundations' s'Cool Food Initiative and we are thus far welcoming Adams, Harding and Monroe Elementary Schools to the program. All these schools will receive a refill station and stainless steel canteens for students and staff. An education component accompanies the program, with CEC staff offering presentations to students, staff and parents as well as an opportunity to screen the film "Bag It."

The SBHS gym is also receiving a station as part of the second year program, as is the Boys and Girls Club on Canon Perdido. This reflects a focus on athletics for the 2011-2012 school year, as bottled water usage is particularly high among student athletes. Rethink the Drink aims to offer an economically viable alternative to purchasing bottled water in addition to providing education about the need to reduce our dependence upon energy intensive products.

Contact Project Manager Kathi King ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) for more information, and visit Rethink the Drink on Facebook to stay up-to-date.

Almost every product and service we rely on today is manufactured with or transported by some amount of fossil fuels. Of course, the most important thing we can do to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels is to use less. However, when you do make a purchase, we encourage you to shop for energy-smart products that use less energy.

Here at CEC, we're all about energy-smart products that help us move towards a fossil-free lifestyle and a fossil-free future for Santa Barbara. Last time you heard about Eileen's favorite clothesline. In this edition of Our Favorite Things, we're hearing from Kathi King, CEC's Rethink the Drink and Donor Relations Manager.

Favorite eco-product: Mesh produce bags (also good for delicate laundry and travel toiletries)
Price: $10 for five
Owned it for: 2 years

As an advocate for alternatives to plastic grocery bags, I'm often asked about the plastic produce bags on rolls inside the market. Those are not likely going anywhere soon, even if communities ban the carryout bags. Produce bags also generally fly under the radar when we talk about plastics data.

We know that in California we use about 16 BILLION plastic bags per year (that's 600 per second), but the numbers don't get crunched on produce bags.

Both types of bags are made from non-renewable resources (oil and natural gas) and, if they enter the environment, they photodegrade into tiny bits, creating pollution for hundreds of years.

The good news is there are reusable options for produce bags just as there are for carryout bags. They are reasonably priced, durable and very lightweight. I even stick one inside the Chico bag in my handbag so there's one handy for those unexpected stops to the store. They also wash and hang dry nicely.

While reusable bags are becoming wonderfully ubiquitous in local stores, produce bags are only beginning to find an audience. No one asks me about the reusable bags in my cart, but I get frequent questions about my collection of produce bags, even at the farmer's market. Last weekend my husband gave one away to an especially inquisitive woman!

The one drawback to reusable produce bags, whether made from mesh, muslin or nylon is that they don't keep refrigerated produce quite as fresh as the plastic bag. My family's solution to this is to take a produce bag from the grocery store every once in a while and reuse it as long as possible. Shaking them out, turning them inside out and air drying them before reusing are all ways to lengthen their life span. We keep a bag of produce bags in a kitchen drawer and transfer our perishables to them once we get home. A side benefit of this is we've become quite creative about saving and reusing other types of plastic packaging (e.g. bread wrappers).

If you're already in the habit of remembering your carryout reusable bags to the store, it's easy to increase your environmental halo by adding a handful of reusable produce bags to your collection.

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You can get a few reusable produce bags at CEC's Amazon Store in the Reusable Bags section. If you find something you like, a percentage of your purchase comes back to CEC. We hope you'll find an idea to inspire you.

Did you miss one of our favorite things? Catch up and read them all in Our Favorite Things blog category.

Stay tuned to hear from our next CEC staffer, Christa Backson, about her favorite energy-smart product.

This week, CEC released "Pointless Plastic," a short video highlighting the need to reduce dependence upon bottled water.

© Erin Feinblatt

The Project

As a part of an overall vision to lead the community away from energy-intensive products, CEC launched its "Rethink the Drink" campaign in January, aiming to reduce single use plastic bottles by 75% in several pilot schools. With funding from local partners, we installed 6 refill stations:

• Franklin Elementary
• Montecito Union Elementary
• Santa Barbara High (2 units)
• Santa Barbara Junior High
• Westmont College gym

The refill stations dispense cold, filtered water with both a regular water fountain spout and a quick-fill mechanism, and electronically display the number of times they've been used. Since the beginning of the year, students have used the stations 46,827 times as of June 6 – dramatically reducing their use of disposable plastic water bottles.

To encourage the students to use the refill stations, CEC and its project funders distributed reusable stainless steel canteens to all 600 students and staff at Franklin Elementary and displayed a Rethink the Drink poster adjacent to each refill station. At Santa Barbara High, 200 canteens were distributed with the help of the Dons Net Café student entrepreneur class, and Santa Barbara Junior High raffled over 50 canteens to students. Using its own funding, the Montecito Union School PTA's Green Team distributes canteens at the beginning of the year to every student and staff member.

 

Before and After

Prior to the project, a waste audit of Franklin Elementary showed that student, faculty and staff were using 275 bottles of water per week. Since installing a refill station, they use fewer than 50 a week.

Over the course of a school year, that's the equivalent of going from more than 11,000 bottles to less than 2,000.

"It is such a wonderful thing to teach students about saving the environment by playing an active role. Students as young as four have learned about how they are saving the earth by using canteens and the refill station. Our kids are healthier and have decided they'd rather drink water than bring anything from home because the canteens are cool and the water tastes good!"

-- Franklin Principal Casie Killgore

 

CEC's Vision

The production and transportation of bottled water is very energy intensive. More than 17 million barrels of oil each year are used to bring bottled water to our stores -- enough to fuel one million vehicles for a year! Despite being recyclable, fewer than 30% of the bottles make it to a recycling bin. CEC's vision is of a fossil free future where we choose energy-smart products that reduce our carbon footprint The reduction of single use plastic water bottles falls in line with that vision and the Rethink the Drink program is helping us get there .

 

Rethink the Drink's funding partners are the Orfalea Foundations, the Ann Jackson Family Foundation, MedBridge Development, and the Montecito Union School Green Team.

Statement from Where's Your Bag

Since 2009, the Where’s Your Bag program has worked with local grocery stores in an effort to reduce single use bag usage in Santa Barbara.  Where’s Your Bag also tables at a wide variety of community events, distributes reusable bags and educates the public about the need to switch from disposables to reusables. The reasons for reduction are well documented in a wide variety of peer-reviewed studies.  Films such as “Bag It” take a close look at all these verified, scientific reasons to move away from disposable plastics.  Plastic bags are of particular interest because of their proliferation in just a few decades – worldwide plastic bag usage is well over 500 million per year.

Where’s Your Bag partners Choose to Reuse and Santa Barbara Channelkeeper have been very involved in the parallel effort to advocate for bag reduction legislation.  While the Where’s Your Bag voluntary effort has been somewhat successful, these groups believe that legislation is really what is needed to see meaningful reduction.  Several California cities and counties have passed bag reduction legislation (Santa Monica, Calabassas, San Jose, Marin County, LA County and many more).  A statewide bag ban (AB 1998) nearly passed in September 2010. Where’s Your Bag believes that this momentum will encourage the state to take action and believes that Santa Barbara should be part of this movement.

Our Letter

The Community Environmental Council (CEC) supports the efforts of Where's Your Bag as a part of our fossil free mission. The recent Ordinance Committee decision not to move forward with bag legislation prompted the following letter to the editor written by Jules Zimmer (CEC Partnership Council) and Paul Orfalea (Orfalea Foundations, CEC Funder):

In the April 21st issue of the Independent, Dean Tambling reported that Councilman Hotchkiss “questioned  the very validity of plastic bags as an environmental concern, arguing that they disintegrate and, being indigestible, pose no threat to coastal wildlife.” [“Council Duo Suffocates Plastic Ban”]

The immediate impact -- of wildlife getting entangled in plastic bags, clogging sewer pipes, blowing around and contaminating seas, lakes and rivers, – are documented and obvious with a walk on a beach or observation of street litter. More importantly, as the plastic bags photo-degrade (rather than “disintegrate”) into smaller toxic petrol-polymers, they eventually contaminate soil and waterways and as a consequence particles are  “digestible” and able to enter the food chain. To the extent that Councilman Hotchkiss was accurately reported, his statement was not factual, lacks “validity” and reflects only an opinion. 

– Jules Zimmer and Paul Orfalea

Published as a Letter to the Editor in April 28th issue of The Independent

 

Take Action

The full council will vote on the matter in the near future. We need your support. Contact your council members to let them know where you stand on this issue:

Mayor Helene Schneider: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Dale Fransisco: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Frank Hotchkiss: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Grant House: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Randy Rowse: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Michael Self: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Bendy White: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Bring your bags! We are featuring our favorite reusable bags in CEC's Amazon store. We've got everything from standard reusable grocery bags, to sandwich and produce bags, to compact Chico bags. If you see something you like and you buy it through CEC’s Amazon site, a percentage of your purchase will come back to CEC – an earth friendly purchase, indeed. If you already use reusable bags at the grocery store, remember to carry one with you for smaller trips to the drug store, clothes shopping, and more.