100th Blog Post!...Gotta Make It Something More than a WooHoo

Glimpsed this commercial on teevee. Paper towels…really green paper towels. We’ve all seen that breed of advert.

Greenest car, ever! Look! Stick your nose in its tail-pipe. Don’t the exhaust smell like roses? Mother Nature’s in love with this car!

…With this Product!

…These paper towels! Snowcapped mountain and clear lake background. See? THE best thing EVER to happen to the good Earth, these paper towels! Y’gotta get these paper towels and save the Earth!

But it’s a disposable paper towel. Folks strip off a square of it, dry their hands, dispose of it, right? If – and it bears repeating, IF – used for more than drying hands, for dabbing the gravy’d mouth during picnic, or for swabbing up some countertop catastrophe, after that it’ll become a crumpled thing, briefly airborne, tossed in the bin.

Naturally, that brings me to the glowing subject of the Cloth Wipe.

Yeah, it’ll have its chain of impacts, production-wise, and environmental, the cloth wipe. All the steps, so that I can hold on high this cloth wipe. Besides the ethical considerations re use of labour. The chain, of growing the cotton, processing it, the making, packaging, shipping, even illuminating the supermarket aisle so I can read the tiny price tag somebody also had to make. But that’s a burrowing headache I don’t need just now. Every manufactured thing has its chain, the costs beyond the 3-for-$1.99.

Here, only comparing green paper wipe against cloth.

Well, simply, I’m biased. Only have ever used cloth. I’ll use cloth towels in the kitchen, washing them daily, until they’re unfit for the kitchen. They then go to bathroom use: countertop, walls, floor, tub and sink. Bathroom cloths still washed daily: to keep them useable as long as possible. When past presentable, the bathroom cloths go toward cleaning the bike, or the twilight life as a rag in my truck.

All this green talk reminds me I should probably call in the hazmat folks. Disposal time for prematurely dead CFLs (compact fluorescent lamps). Two of ‘em. Seems they’re not the bees’ knees, these. I have one that for two years continues to inadequately illuminate the space what passes for living room. But 2 dead ones…

And it really wasn’t funny, however many Earth Days ago it was, when all those genius politicians mounted the swinging big bell together, ringing out the death knell for the incandescent lightbulb – even pushing for its ban – while extolling…these mercury’d things.
MERCURY, you…!

Picture your local landfill. Your one of how many around the good Earth? Seagulls crying, wheeling in the sky. Crumpled paper toweling flitting about the place. Under it all, out of sight, and so our great grandkids’ worry, a lake of mercury gradually swelling, drop by drop, from these dead CFLs.

Not a nice note to end on, that. Needs a little Earth-hug closing. My spent cloth wipes! Their very last use. I’ll have to climb a mountain for this, maybe Everest, Chomolungma. Find a high Himalayan stone stupa. Add to the strings of prayer flags streaming our hopes…