It’s not just in the ocean, but in our streets, in our landfills and in our parks. Let’s stop it now!

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Have you ever been at the beach and noticed all the tiny pieces of Styrofoam in the sand?

Or, have you ever worked to clean up a beach only to realize that nothing you could ever do would remove all those little pieces of Styrofoam? That’s why we need to ban single-use Styrofoam containers today.

Join the 7,000 people who have called on the governor to take action.

Why not just ask the fast-food chains to use bio-degradable takeout containers? It just seems crazy that we would use something for 10 minutes and then have it float in the ocean, or lie in the sand, for hundreds and hundreds of years.

The benefits simply do not outweigh the costs.
Styrofoam (expanded and extruded polystyrene foam) is getting more and more pervasive in the marine environment. When littered or blown from trashcans, it is carried from streets and through storm drains out to the ocean. It breaks into smaller and smaller pieces that wash onto the shore, and which animals mistake for food.

Styrofoam has not been around long enough to know its true life. Most scientists agree that it will break down into increasingly smaller pieces but never disappear.

Let’s ban single-use Styrofoam takeout containers before they cause any more damage. Click on the link below to tell the governor that you want to take back your beaches. And please, forward this e-mail to your family and friends.

http://www.environmentcalifornia.org/action/oceans/say-no-to-styro?id4=ES
Thanks for standing up for our beaches,

Dan Jacobson
Environment California Legislative Director
DanJ@environmentcalifornia.org
http://www.environmentcalifornia.org

I went to the beach to check the surf, board and wetsuit always ready in my Honda Element, the quintessential surfmobile.
Surf was tiny, and getting smaller with the dropping tide.
So I opted to enjoy the beach instead and search for sea glass (low tide is a good time to do this), which I use in some of my jewelry designs.

I had my iphone along, so it was easy to take some pictures and share this day with you.

I skipped through the tide pools barefoot and with shorts on for the first time in many months. Pure pleasure!

It was a typical summer day at the beach in California. Lots of Mexican families, people hanging out, kids playing in the water.
These three tykes were having a blast repurposing garbage into fun toys. They were filling empty Cheetos bags with water and dumping the contents on each other’s heads. This is a scene typical just on just about any beach in the world, Bali, Panama, Hawai’i, I’ve seen it everywhere. Kids are the same everywhere.

I usually don’t have time to search for sea glass. It was so nice just to shut down the brain and relax wandering up and down the beach for a spell. My friend Tracy collects most of the sea glass we use in my jewelry collection in her daily walks on the beach. I also started a sea glass exchange program with other local beachcombers that now brings in additional supplies to help me keep up with the demand for my designs.

I was truly stoked to find a sizeable rare blue piece, perfect for a pendant design!

This was an odd thing to find at the beach. At least, I’ve never seen it before.
Mushrooms growing in the sand.

I much enjoyed watching the sandpipers scurry back and forth on the wet sand with the tide chasing them. Looking at their cute little bird footprints next to mine was inspiration enough for a snapshot.

This is my sea glass booty I took home. You can see some of the pieces that I already set aside to make two pendants and a ring. There are two very interesting light green milky glass pieces I found and a piece of light blue tile is shown as well.

This is what the jewelry looks like when it’s finished. My silversmith in Bali does excellent work with the raised open back bezels and box hinges, all hand-crafted in Bali. We use the sea glass pieces the way we find them, shaped by the ocean’s movement and rocks and sand, and I love repurposing found objects without taking away from the environment they come from. My designs are sold in boutiques and better surf shops around the world and on my website, Bettybelts.com. People really enjoy having small piece of California to wear.

Thank you for joining me!
Donna

So lately it became obvious to me that this needs to be reposted to get the word out beyond my radius of conscious friends, customers and like-minded business owners.
Please pass it on, post it, twitter it, blog it, email it on to help educate about what the REAL cost is for the goods we consume.
Make your kids watch this, your parents, your students, your friends.
This is stuff people need to know.

The Story of Stuff

Meanwhile I’ll try to find the time to blog about why I won’t sell my brand to big box retailers.

Smiles and optimism for the new year!

Donna
Owner/Designer
Betty Belts

Everyone should see this for many enlightening yet entertaining video.
Well worth the 20 minutes.

THE STORY OF STUFF

An excerpt from the website, where you can also find many resources and ways to help:
The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns, with a special focus on the United States. All the stuff in our lives, beginning from the extraction of the resources to make it, through its production, sale, use and disposal, affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues and calls for all of us to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something. It’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

After watching this, you may wonder why someone like me who produces material goods (ocean inspired accessories) is spreading this message. But this is how I’ve felt for a long time, even before I started my company five years ago.

In my design and manufacturing I focus on:
-Sustainability of manufacturing and materials
-Social responsibility for the people who work for me
-Sustainability in style and design (not trendy, but always unique)

I can’t say for sure, but I doubt much, if any of my product ends up in the trash.
Even if, say, a belt starts to unravel, I assume that my customers are savvy enough to save the pretty beads and shells and create something new with them at some point or pass it along to someone who will. I personally donate all of our scrap materials to a local crafting center for developmentally disabled and the amount of happiness that provides is a really cool thing.

How many ways can motto Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and REinvent be applied in your life?

I started using this motto many years ago for my company policy. I’ve actually made an art of it, some people say.
Here is a very short list of things I do with the business and in the Betty B. shop:

1. Reuse packaging materials collected from a network of neighboring businesses and my own incoming for ALL outbound shipping.
2. Walk or bike to run errands nearby. Great way to stay in touch with the community!
3. I save all scraps and useful items, i.e. loose beads, stones, strings, shells and much more for a local craft room for the handicapped. They LOVE it and nothing gets wasted.
4. Go paperless where I can, only sending catalog printouts when customers demand it.
5. Keep automatic timers on all display lights in the store, so they don’t stay on at night longer than needed.
6. Scour garage sales and the beach for interesting and unique items to use to display my goods in the shop instead of buying new.
7. Customers can bring in their old (small) batteries to our battery drop at the shop for recycling. We bring them to the recycling center. This prevents batteries from ending up in a landfill.
8. Post whatever I don’t need anymore on Freecycle. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure!

Stay inspired!

Aloha,
Donna

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and REinvent!

For further reading on ways to reduce, etc. go to www.blogactionday.org

Just click on the box below to go to the link on COOP America’s Website. Please forward this to anyone who you think might want to nominate us too. Thank you, friends!

It sounds amusing, but it’s a very serious subject. This article from Best Life magazine tells us about the gyres, enormous areas of ocean that have collected huge amounts of garbage caught in currents that keep them there and even more compellingly, it tells us about how these toxic plastics get into the food chain and our systems.

Our oceans are turning into plastic…are we?
By Susan Casey, Photographs by Gregg Segal May 11, 2007

A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility…and worse.

Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life’s purpose in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.

It happened on August 3, 1997, a lovely day, at least in the beginning: Sunny. Little wind. Water the color of sapphires. Moore and the crew of Alguita, his 50-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran, sliced through the sea.

Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered Alguita’s course, veering slightly north. He had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean, a place most boats purposely avoided. For one thing, it was becalmed. “The doldrums,” sailors called it, and they steered clear. So did the ocean’s top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters, flush with prey. The gyre was more like a desert—a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it.

It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.

How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What did it mean?

Read on here

With a motto like Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and REinvent, I’m a big fan of finding a home for everything and not consuming more than I need. At the Betty Belts warehouse, I have a nice little setup with a few other local businesses, in which they save their used boxes and packing materials for me and I come by and get them regularly. Before that was established, I went dumpster diving (in the cleaner recycled bins) for what I needed. The point is why go out and spend money on something that can easily be reused again and again? I would feel so guilty if I had to actually BUY boxes and (yikes) bubble wrap.

Seriously, our society needs to cut down on the wastefulness of the consumer mentality.

So I was thrilled to discover Freecycle.org . It’s like a “trash to treasure” middleman on the Internet, which redirects unwanted goods to people who will be able to use them again before the life of the items ends in a recycling facility or (yikes!) a landfill.

And it’s so easy to use. Freecycle also has the nice effect of bringing people in the community together in a way that is very tangible and human. You can give or get anything from toys to clothes, to moving boxes to appliances and collectibles. People regularly clean out their garages and post what needs a new home. It’s fun to see people sharing and finding new homes for things. Moms looking for items for a school play, someone replacing an appliance and giving away the old one. Somebody was recently offering a giant pile of bricks from a remodel, even. It’s really true that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure and the proof is in Freecycle.

Please join your local Freecycle group and see for yourself how it’s helping society rethink what they put in the trash!

Lots of Aloha,

Donna