I was watching the news a few days ago and they had a segment on reusable grocery bags. In Ontario we now have to pay for plastic grocery bags if we want to use them. Finally! Now the plastics industry has funded a study to look at the health implications of using the reusable grocery bags. What were the results? Bacteria. Yep, bacteria in the bags from carrying food in them. Hmmmm go figure. Seriously, a study was needed to determine that carrying food in a reusable bag over and over again will cause bacteria to build up???

The recommended way to combat this bacteria is to wash your reusable bags. Easy enough. But what is funny is that the plastics industry is trying to use this study to show that people would be better off using the plastic grocery bags. Le sigh.

What I find to be ironic about this whole thing is that they did not mention (at least in the information I found) the plastic reusable totes that you can get to carry your groceries in. I guess they have some sort of superhuman power that allows them to repel all bacteria??? Or is it because they are made from plastic and it would defeat the point of the study for the plastics industry to show that the same bacteria found in reusable bags can be found in the plastic reusable bins.

We needed to paint a good portion of the inside of our house and decided to check out the Eco-friendly paint options. Man are there lots of them out there and I can see how easy it would be for people to get confused and frustrated. Some brands are even making it look like their paint is certified when really it is just a fancy symbol that they themselves have added. We weeded these one's out quickly and were able to focus on the paints that were actually available in Canada and were certified by a 3rd party.

Benjamin Moore was the only one of the 3 that offered VOC free base paint and tinters making it a true VOC free paint. The Olympic and Sico brands offered VOC free base paint but the tinters added were not VOC free making them in the end low VOC paints.

While we would have loved to get VOC free paint and go with the Benjamin Moore line we had to look at the cost of the paint. At nearly double the cost of the 2nd in line (Sico) we decided that it was just not worth it so we went with the Sico Chamois paint. We were getting a light tint anyways so we knew that the VOC's being added in the tint would be less than if we were doing a darker paint.

I think this is something to keep in mind when you are looking at VOC free paints. Are they really a true VOC free paint or is it just the base that is VOC free. If you are going for a dark colour you may want to just pay the extra money and go with Benjamin Moore to ensure you keep your paint as low VOC as possible. Regardless of what you decide these paints are still better than the "regular" paints on the market.

I have heard people questioning if the low VOC and VOC free paints are of any quality. We found the Sico paint to be exceptional. It went on really well and provided excellent coverage. Honestly it is one of the nicest paints we have worked with.

We have been composting for awhile now and I know that we are producing less garbage but I have no idea how much of our waste goes to composting vs recycling vs garbage. So we are going to find out. We have also been adding our paper shreddings to the compost so we have been diverting some of our waste from the recycling stream to the compost stream.

We plan on starting right after the weekly garbage/recycling day. We will measure (by weight) the compost bin, garbage bag and recycling bins each week on garbage/recyling day. We plan on doing this for at least 2 weeks so we can get a good average of how much goes to each waste stream during a given week.

This should be interesting and help to see if we have any room for improvement in any of these waste streams. It may also lead to us breaking the 3 streams down further to see where exactly our waste is going. But that would be a whole other weekly challenge.




See the Results of our Waste Audit. 

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