So I confess that I switched back to Lysol. For months, I had been struggling with an eco-friendly biodegradable toilet cleaner by Seventh Generation, but the unfortunate line of grey scum in my loo just wouldn't go away. Enter the bleach, exit the scum. Problem solved, apart from the agent of doom environmental guilt of course.Generally, I consider myself to be an averagely responsible consumer where it comes to the green lifestyle. I recycle religiously. I compost occasionally. I own a vast number of shopping totes and reusable water bottles, and remember to take them with me at least 75% of the time. But I'm pretty much over what the Wall Street Journal christened the Pampered Countertop of products...the Mrs Meyers, Method Home, Seventh Generation stuff which looks pretty and smells great but does a fairly lousy job of actually cleaning anything. I mean the hand soap is fairly harmless. But have you tried Mrs Meyer's Lemon Verbena shower cleaner? You need a real cleaning product at hand to wipe off the streaks and cut through the limescale deposits. So you end up cleaning twice!
It was such a relief to discover that I was not alone in my disdain for some of these products, and that folk around the country are having a hard time adapting to the filmy deposit which new eco dishwasher detergents leave on their glasses and dishes. As one savvy consumer put it, if you have to wash the dishes again (either before or after they've been through the dishwasher), then surely the excess water consumption is nearly as environmentally unsound as the phosphates in the old sudsy detergents were in the first place?
The problem with my argument is of course, that while my little piece of pollution is just a drop in the world's mop and bucket, if you add all the other polluters, it suddenly becomes more serious. And if you scale up my argument to a bigger issue, it just doesn't work at all.
Take, for example, uranium mining at the Grand Canyon. Two years ago, the Secretary of the Interior placed a moratorium on new mining claims within 1 million acres around the Canyon. But that period is about to expire, and public comment is sought by April 4th as to which of four proposals the Bureau of Land Management should adopt with regards to mining in the vicinity of the Canyon. Let's make this easy. The Colorado river supplies drinking water to some 25 million Americans. Uranium contaminated drinking water, anyone? I don't think it's necessary to refer to recent events in Japan to make this point any clearer.
Should you need any further convincing on this subject, then I encourage you to visit the Grand Canyon Trust's website, which has additional cogent reasons for supporting Alternative B (which would ban all new uranium mining claims within public land watersheds that drain directly into Grand Canyon National Park), and has convenient links to the relevant reports, as well as the e-mail address where you can comment.
Here endeth the lesson. Because I know that the above two paragraphs sounded just a tad preachy. Which is ironic, given where I started. I guess I'm just a conflicted green contender - eager to tell others how to clean up their act, before I have my own house in order.
