Asian Longhorn Bark Beetle

Joan Allen from UConn Home And Garden Education Center will be speaking to our club on May 25, 2010 on the devastation caused by this preditor insect. You can read more in this New York Times Article.  

A photo of the Asian Bark Beetle

Earth Friendly

The Mystic Garden club is taking steps to be friendly to the environment. Barbara Tacy has been presenting information on packaging, helping us to differentiate between packaging which is recyclable and which is not. Members are encouraged to stop purchasing items which are encased in non-recyclable materials. The impermeable plastic wrapping called "clamshell" packaging is both frustrating and non-recyclable.

The major retailer, Amazon.com has joined with its suppliers to eliminate the very frustrating "clamshell" packaging.

The New York Times reported ..

In Amazon’s “frustration-free packaging” initiative involving Mattel, its subsidiary Fisher-Price, Microsoft and Transcend, an electronics maker, the companies will ship some of their best-selling products to Amazon in cardboard boxes that don’t fight back.

These cardboard boxes are also recyclable. You can read the whole article at Packages You Won't Need a Saw to Open.

Members are also encouraged to use re-usable shopping bags.  (See our blog article Going Green - ReUsable Shopping Bags)





The Mystic Garden Club sells reusable, Earth Friendly shopping bags.

The photo below shows the items presented to identify as recyclable or non-recyclable.

The items on the left can be recycled while the ones on the right must go in the trash or be reused.

Going Green with fewer Catalogs

If you are overwhelmed with catalogs and hate to have all that paper wasted you can visit www.catalogchoice.org to choose which catalog mailing lists you'd like to be removed from.

Going Green - Reusable Shopping Bags

It's not surprising that the plethora of plastic shopping bags is not good for the environment. I have been reusing my plastic bags whenever I go to a wholesale club but other than that they collect in my kitchen at a prodigious rate. So I decided to buy some reusable shopping bags. I have been very pleased with the bags I've received so I thought I'd share what I've found.

First I bought a nice, light, reinforced roomy bag from Alchemy Goods. It is very surdy and lightweight and it is completely constructed with recycled materials. The bag is made of recycled banner material and the straps are used seat belts with the handle reinforced by used bicycle tires. The resulting bag is handsome, very strong and lightweight. Not inexpensive but I am very happy with it.

Now one bag will just not get me home from the grocery store. So I purchased a group of 5 nylon bags from EnviroSax They carry twice the amount of a typical plastic grocery bag and they are small and light enough to fit in a little sack in my glove compartment.

Now my major obstacle is just remembering to bring these into the stores! I have succeeded a few times so I'm hopeful I can be retrained. They are a pleasure to use - nice and strong and I'm not inundated with more plastic bags to litter our environment. So I heartily endorse both of these items.