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“It’s 3, 5 and 7, right? Or is it 4, 6 and 7?” “There’s a 7?” When safe plastics came up at a get-together at my house last week, and none of could remember exactly what we were trying to avoid, I realized it was time for a refresher. I’ve done a little research on your behalf to clarify which are safe plastics and which are best avoided.

No. 1 plastic is PET, or polyethylene terephthalate. Commonly used in beverage bottles, PET is generally considered safe, although some warn not to reuse it repeatedly because it may degrade over time. Eco alternative: Stainless-steel or glass bottles.

No. 2 plastic is HDPE, or high-density polyethylene. This plastic is also considered safe; you’ll find the No. 2 symbol on yogurt containers, juice jugs and in plastic bags such as those used by grocery stores and inside cereal boxes.

No. 3 plastic is PVC, or polyvinyl chloride. Found in food packaging and used in some cling wraps, there are enough studies showing concerns about PVC that it’s best avoided. Better safe than sorry, right? Eco alternative: Stainless-steel or glass food containers, or containers made with No. 1 or No. 2 plastic.

No. 4 plastic is LDPE, or low-density polyethylene. This flexible plastic is used to make plastic bags and wraps, among other applications. While considered safe, who wants to see all those bags in the landfill? Eco alternative: Reuseable bags for produce and all your shopping needs. I’m sure Eco Logic readers are all over this one!

No. 5 plastic is PP, or polypropylene. You’ll see it in reuseable food containers (not the lids, though), some condiment bottles, and it’s used to make fleece jackets, that thin, clear film that envelops stationery, and other uses. While generally considered safe, not every municipality has recycling facilities for polypropylene.

No. 6 plastic is PS, or polystyrene. Commonly used in foam takeout, egg, hot drink and other containers, as well as for meat trays and foam packing materials, polystyrene will release styrene monomer, particularly when your food is hot and contains fat. Polystyrene is unrecyclable in many areas. Eco alternative: Bring your own takeout food container or, if you ordered something dry like a pizza, quesadilla or sandwich, ask the server to put your leftovers in tinfoil. Buy your meat from a butcher who uses butcher paper.

No. 7 plastic can be a few things, but is most often polycarbonate, used to make hard, transparent plastic products, and which may contain BPA, or bisphenol-A. Like polystyrene, BPA will release from polycarbonate more quickly when heated. Eco alternative: Once again, stainless-steel or glass bottles are great choices.

Are you avoiding certain plastics?

I’m away for a few days, but writer Catherine Labelle has a story she would like to share with you.

Take it away Catherine!

*

An eerie silence creeps into my backyard.  No more calls from the cardinals, and the squirrels have stopped leaping from tree to tree.  Then I hear it, an ear piercing screech as a shadow moves along the pages of my book.  The hawks are back!

Every summer a pair of red-tailed hawks descend upon my neighbourhood. The graceful raptors swoop and soar in the sky, seemingly performing for their many admirers. With the hawks’ arrival, my neighbours fall into a familiar routine – a Jack Russel a few doors down is no longer tied outside, and cats are kept indoors. Personally, I run around with my camera for days trying to catch a snapshot of these magnificent creatures. Last year I narrowly missed one that was perched in full view on a nearby washing pole.

What attracts these birds of prey to my little corner of the world is a bank of 100-foot trees that pass along the edge of my yard.  The hawks rely on these trees and others like them for shelter and a base from which to hunt.  It is not unusual to spot one of the hawks perched on a branch scouring the ground below for squirrels, mice and snakes.

Considering I live in the largest city in Canada, I am extremely fortunate to have such impressive towering giants so close. Let’s face it, cities, particularly large ones, are not generally kind to trees. Each year more and more mature trees in my neighbourhood disappear.  In the spring we lost a 125-year-old tree a few streets over.  Replacements, what few there are, are saplings that will take decades to grow to a decent size.  That is if they survive the city’s smog, changing climate and never ending development. With urban trees facing such challenges, it is a wonder whether we will be seeing hawks in the city for much longer.

Perhaps all is not lost.  Organizations like LEAF, a not-for-profit, are working to restore more tree-cover in urban centres.  Trees Ontario and Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources have joined together in an ambitious greening program. Their goal: plant 50 million trees in southern Ontario within 10 years.

My hope is next summer, the tranquility in my backyard will again be broken.  That once again I will hear the screech and know the hawks have made it back.

Photo copyright Catherine Labelle.

Looking at my grocery list the other day, I realize that I often buy the same things. Whether in my organic food delivery box, at the store or at the farmer’s market, I seem to like Boston lettuce, button mushrooms, zucchini, asparagus, grape tomatoes and broccoli, maybe some fennel. I grill, stir-fry and roast these things, put them in salads, saute them for pastas, drop them in risotto. Don’t get me wrong, I love these tasty veggies. But I recently learned a fact that made it clear I’d be doing the planet a favour if I expanded my shopping list.

According to The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Self-Sufficient Living, “Throughout history, nearly 10,000 different plants have provided food for humans. Today, only about 150 species are used anywhere in the world. More than 70 percent of our food comes from just 12 of these.”

Wow. I can see how not only eating locally, but trying new things would benefit local producers — and the environment. According to this paper from the University of California, “Properly managed, diversity can also buffer a farm in a biological sense. For example, in annual cropping systems, crop rotation can be used to suppress weeds, pathogens and insect pests.”

So the next time I’m at the farmer’s market (that should be tomorrow) I’ll pick something new, and let you know what it was and how I prepared it as part of a tasty meal.

In the meantime, here are a few delicious recipes from Homemakers that include veggies that, I’m betting, are outside of that top 12 list!

Grilled Quail. Yes, diversity counts in the butcher shop as well!

Beet and Jerusalem Artichoke Salad with Blue Cheese Dressing. Yes, Jerusalem Artichokes can be grown locally!

Braised Baby Bok Choy with Lemon and Lemon Grass This sounds so tasty, I’m looking forward to finding some fresh bok choy!

Cilantro and Mint Raita. This is a tasty dip, and feels cool on hot days.

Green Superstar Soup. This features kale, collard greens and spinach. Healthfully delicious!

What are your favourite unconventional summer foods, and how do you prepare them?

Charge 'er up!

It’s a race to the production line, but unless a shipload of Nissan Leafs (Leaves?) or Tesla S show up within the next couple of months, the first fully electric car to be available at Canadian dealers, legal on Canadian roads will be the smart. Already sold in Europe, 1,500 smart fortwo electric drive cars will be available for long-term lease in North America starting this fall, rumoured to cost approx. $600 per month. This second generation of smart EVs (electric vehicles) will have a range of 135 kilometres and a home-charging system, the smart can handle many Canadians’ daily needs. By 2012, the car will be available in 40 countries.

Provincial governments are offering rebates for buying or leasing EVs; Ontario is offering between $5,000 and $8,000. They plan to offer recharging stations at some commuter hubs and allow EV drivers into HOV lanes, even if there’s only one person in the car. Alberta is offering $3,000 rebates for hybrid taxis. Manitoba is actually testing a hybrid vehicle made in the province, hoping for a home-grown alternative vehicle, but no word yet on rebates for individuals.

Will the electric car wipe the gasser off the map? Of course not. Not right away. But why do arguments against the electric car always assume it’s eat or be eaten? Just like banking, where we once had just tellers, then we had tellers and phone banking, then we added ATMs, then we added internet banking, then mobile banking, adding electric cars simply means new options for the marketplace. As the cost of fuel rises, and the scale of electric car production increases, no doubt EVs will seem increasingly attractive. Not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s convenient. (Think about it: You could “fill up” overnight at home, when power rates are at their cheapest, rather than stopping by a station.)

Me, I’m just looking forward to an affordable zero-emission choice.

Hi everybody! I’m swamped finalizing the September issue of Homemakers magazine. The rest of the team and I are working hard to make sure every t is crossed! So until tomorrow, here’s an interesting video I found showing a reporter gathering water samples at various public beaches in Alabama – beaches that are being enjoyed by lots of people, including little kids – in order to determine the oil levels at each beach. The results? Well, watch for yourself.

Let’s share our garbage-reduction tips. I have a great prize in store for your winning idea!

I’ll share mine first, to get you started.

In the past I’ve had trouble keeping some kinds of packages out of the garbage because of the stuff left in them. But these days I’m trying to use my green bin to the fullest, and that means getting icky spoiled food out of the bottom of containers so I can send the spoiled food for composting and the container it was in to be recycled.

During Toronto’s garbage strike last year, I started freezing my green bin material; a big part of my freezer was devoted to waste by the time the strike was over. I learned something: when you don’t put smelly stuff in your green bin – particularly in summer – raccoons won’t tip over your bin in the middle of the night and make a big stinky mess.

So I started freezing my green bin waste regularly, taking it from the freezer to the bin on collection morning. And I also found that freezing leftover, spoiled dips and sauces, the remainders of pie stuck to a pie plate, and other food I should have eaten earlier makes it a lot easier to separate the food from its package. Last night I took a spoiled container of hummus out of the freezer, and I just stuck a (dull) knife into it and pulled, and the whole disc of frozen hummus popped out at once. Shhhhpock! I put it into the green bin and put the hummus container in the blue bin.

So there’s my tip for keeping more food – and containers – out of the garbage (while thwarting raccoons). Do you have a garbage-reduction tip to share?

I have a great prize to get you started. The Eco-Clean Deck by Annie B. Bond (Random House, $18.99) is not a book, it’s a deck of tabbed cards with recipes for homemade green-cleaning solutions.

Instructions: Simply post a garbage-collection tip below to win. That’s it!

Rules: You must live in Canada and be at least the age of majority for the province or territory in which you live. Not open to employees of Transcontinental media, nor their families or anyone they live with. Prize will be drawn randomly from all entrants who comment with a garbage-reduction tip. Contest closes Monday, July 19 at 12 p.m. EST.

Good luck! I’m looking forward to hearing your tips!

Super hot days? They can take it. Long stretches without rain, and no watering? They can take it. Hammering deluge of rain? They can take it. My native wildflowers, particularly the black-eyed Susans shown here, are thriving in the swings of extremes in my street-side front garden.

While I like the sweet blossoms of non-native annuals, and I do have a few types of adorable pansies tucked into baskets here and there, I am so impressed with my native plants’ ability to deal with extremes. These black-eyed Susans (rudbeckia hirta) had lots of buds ready to pop, but they didn’t do so until after a good rain. My pansies tried to bloom in dry conditions, and some of the little blossoms quickly faded, their thin fleshy stems collapsing in defeat when I was away for a long weekend and not there to water them. I don’t mind coddling pretty flowers – they pay back in their cheeriness, but when a plant doesn’t make it I replace it with a native perennial wildflower. Within a couple of years, hopefully I’ll have a robust garden full of pretty wildflowers that just come up and put their mettle to the petal.

Aside from black-eyed Susans, my garden family of native wildflowers includes wild columbine, yarrow, purple coneflower (Echinacea), woodland sunflower, and I’m working on milkweed (most of the seeds I planted last fall didn’t germinate).

Are you growing any native wildflowers or other native plants this year?

Making a cup of tea this morning, I paused to appreciate the simple pillow of Earl Grey tea wrapped in paper, a delicous gift from mom from her visit to Harrods. I like the idea of making tea with an infuser, but at work, with dozens of people sharing a kitchen, the handling process is not practical.

I often try new kinds of tea, but I’ve noticed a disconcerting trend: many new premium teas, espousing health benefits, are packaged in silk, and I discovered that those fancy “pyramid” tea bags are made of nylon. The silk bags are natural fibres, sure, and could potentially break down given enough heat, microbes and time, but nylon? That’s made from petroleum. Hope you had a great cuppa, ’cause that tea bag is forever, baby. I’m not sure why these difficult or impossible to compost tea bags are considered “premium.” I think the companies like these materials because it’s easier for us to see their premium ingredients.

So I look for paper tea bags, particularly fair trade, organic teas in paper bags that don’t appear bleached. Good tea in bags without labels and staples are even better (and make composting even easier).

To learn all about tea, have a look at this terrific article here at homemakers.com.

Communication about a new “eco fee” on some goods sold in Ontario has been less than stellar. I’m usually contacted about environment-related announcements, and I’m always on the lookout for this kind of information. But I didn’t know about this program until it was mentioned on the TV news last night; the news crew showed people at a hardware store surprised by the new eco fee on their receipt. It seems that all we’re hearing from the government about it is, “This is not a tax.” OK fine, but what, specifically is the fee meant to do?

Here’s what I’ve learned so far: On July 1, Stewardship Ontario launched the “Orange Drop” program, a hazardous waste collection program. Consumers in Ontario will now be asked to take household hazardous waste to a collection point, and we will also see an “eco fee” added to the purchase of 22 types of goods, from household detergents to fire extinguishers, syringes to pharmaceuticals.

From what Stewardship Ontario says, I’m gathering that the program’s reason for being is to more effectively divert hazardous waste out of landfills, and safely handle hazardous waste. Of course this is a very good thing in terms of protecting our water supply, among other benefits. The program provides drop sites across Ontario for our hazardous waste; you can search for sites here. That’s a lot more convenient than the infrequent collection opportunities offered by some municipal governments. Who wants to keep that kind of waste around for several months?

The fee side of the program is applied to companies’ products to cover collection, transportation and processing of this hazardous waste, essentially spent containers and other product packaging of various kinds. The fees Stewardship Ontario is charging each company are based on the number of units of product they distribute in the Ontario marketplace; the fee amounts are approved by the Ontario minister of the environment. So why are fees showing up when you buy certain goods? It appears that some companies have decided to pass the fee on directly to the consumer.

So how will we know if the program is really keeping hazardous goods out of landfills? And how will the nasty waste be dealt with exactly? I’ll pose that question and get back to you!

I thought they were dead. Like crispy-fried dead. The tomatoes that I’d worked so hard bring to fruition (well, at least to fruit) had their leaves curled up, branches saggy, some of them tinged with yellow. Not without a fight, I thought, not without a little more effort to see some juicy red seedy globes in a salad later this summer.

I’d been away for three days, and although I’d watered everything from my rain barrel before I left, it had been blindingly hot and uncomfortably humid, several degrees above seasonal norms (experts say climate change is a likely contributor) . My veggies, particularly my peppers and tomatoes, just couldn’t handle that.

I used rich, black soil when I’d potted my veggies, mixed with some dead leaves and topped with a thick layer of mulch. But now the soil was compacted, likely thanks to heavy rains and then severe heat. Taking the pots into my makeshift plant hospital one by one, I tried to loosen up the soil by flexing the pots, adding more good soil and kelp meal, then adding a lot more mulch on top. I watered each plant thoroughly but lightly from my rain barrel, trying to urge the soil to absorb as much water as possible.

I’ve been trying to conserve water, saving hose waterings for long stretches of dry weather, performed at night when the water would seep into the ground and lose less to evaporation. So far this year I’ve only watered my garden this way twice. I usually just use a watering can and my rain barrel since saving water means protecting watersheds and conserving energy.

I was rewarded for my efforts: this morning my potted veggies didn’t look entirely better, but they were significantly perked up. In 30-degree heat, I think that’s all I can ask for.

Going forward, I think I’m going to keep adding a bit of good soil, some leaves and mulch to my plants, to retain as much moisture as possible. And next time I go away for a couple of days, I’ll put those veggies in partial shade. They may not get all the sun they crave, but at least they won’t be crispy.

Have you brought any plants back from the brink?