It’s been a while since I’ve posted, and my excuse is that I’ve been too busy to cook, and therefore not only too busy to blog, but haven’t had much to blog about. Nathan and I spent most of the past 2 weeks remodeling our bathroom – it took an entire weekend, plus evenings for several days before and after. Our compromise (reward? bribe?) to ourselves was that we ate out a lot, and got a lot of takeout, while we were doing all this work. I have no guilt. I just don’t have any recent blog posts, either. It’s worth it, because our bathroom is lovely now, and no longer a hideous shade of yellow.
In the course of working on the bathroom, I griped to Nathan that it’s really hard to find green products for home improvement, and hard to tell just how harmful conventional products are. We made a special effort to find low-VOC paint, for example, and it was a lifesaver – you could hardly smell it! But for caulk, grout, and a dozen other things we kept running to the hardware store to get, we didn’t pay so much attention.
There just aren’t great standards for these sorts of products. Food has its organic standard, and regardless of whether you feel Certified Organic is strict enough, at least you know what it means, and it’s easy to find food that’s certified. With cleaning and home improvement products, there’s nothing so widespread. I know there are a few out there, like the Cradle-to-Cradle certification, which is a very high standard. Right now, it’s applied mostly to construction materials and textiles. You can see a full list of certified products on their site. To oversimplify, the goal of Cradle-to-Cradle is to look at the entire lifecycle of a product and find only neutral or positive outputs – no negative side-effects. And I’ve hardly ever noticed it on a product in a store.
Yet, to my surprise, I found it here:
This is the box that my seed potatoes came in (from Wood Prairie Farm by way of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange). The potatoes are organic, but the box itself is just a plain ol’ Post Office box. I didn’t notice the certification until I was breaking it down for recycling.
So not only does USPS let you send a letter across the country in a few days for less than a dollar, apparently they also have super-sustainable packaging!
Isn’t that just cool?