clean sweeps

+ Whoa! Check out this awesome chandelier, made entirely from method's iconic (and now vintage, sniff sniff!) dish soap bottles! It's beautiful! method posted this recently on their twitter account! Remember, you can follow along with their tweets and twitters right here on method lust! Just check the right sidebar for updates!

+ Ok, so I almost had a plastic bag battle of words this weekend. Ha ha! Well, to be honest I wasn't in the best of mental spaces at this particular moment on Saturday as I stood in line at Target (you can read all about it over on my other (yes, other!) blog Silver Glitter Falling. It pertains to attending my first ever gay marriage equality rally, and why I ended up attending! Let's just say two close-minded men got me all riled up! Which led me to...) standing in line at Target.

This woman was purchasing some sort of cover for her bed, which was completely in it's own zipped up plastic bag, like they usually come. And as she made her purchase, and as I stood there with my reusable tote in hand; she asked if they had a large plastic bag to put her purchase in. She wanted a large plastic bag to put her plastic bagged cover in?! What the heck? Oh, I was just not in the mood that day. And I was SO very close to blurting out "You know, your cover is already in a plastic bag! Why do you think you need another one? All you'll do is carry it home, and throw the thing away! Don't you know they're bad for the environment! How about you attempt to think before you just blindly go about your life? Huh! Huh?! Don't you love kittens and puppy dogs and polar bears? No, it appears you don't. Cause every plastic bag you take drowns a polar bear. That's right, woman! That's right! Think about that for a moment! Why don't you go over there and pick yourself up a reusable Target tote. Now, do it now! I'll wait! SAVE THE WORLD!" and then my mind snapped back, and I thought "So THAT'S how some of those Greenpeace people get after a while..." No wonder they head into questionable territory with some of their actions. Standing around and watching other people NOT think (or care?) can get to you after a while!

And while standing up for your rights, and beliefs is important; I also realized berating an older woman for taking a plastic bag given the current irritated mental state I was in at the moment MIGHT not be the best medicine to hand out. Peace and love, peace and love. Ah, mom would be so proud!

+ ...and speaking of plastic bags, method's people against dirty blog posted this recently!

"NYC mayor looking to ban plastic bags

There's an article on TreeHugger that's really something to boast about. NYC mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is looking to charge consumers 6 cents per plastic bag (5 of which would go to the city, 1 of which would go back to the store). The hope is to reduce the use of plastic shopping bags and promote the use of reusable shopping bags.

Plastic bags are an inefficient use of non-renewable materials – they take a long time to break down, are brutally ugly eyesores, can interfere with water drainage and recycling systems and, worst of all, are totally unnecessary. Companies around the world churn out over 4 trillion plastic bags a year. Ugh.

While paper bags are a better option in some respects, they are still unneeded waste. This is why we love the idea of promoting the use of reusable shopping bags. They're a much better alternative for the environment and some stores even give you discounts for bringing in your own bag. These bags can be made of a bunch of different materials all varying in their degree of greenness, but what makes them really effective is when you use them over and over and we're all in support of that.

Our own hometown, San Francisco, became the first city in the US to ban the use of plastic bags back in 2007. While we like to think that SF helped pave the way for other cities to realize just how dirty plastic bags can be, we are most impressed by the results seen in Ireland, who placed a 15 cent levy on plastic bags in 2002, and saw a 90% reduction in their use (resulting in 1 billion fewer bags used per year) and raised over 12 million dollars of dedicated environmental program funding in the first year – all things that we’d love to see result from the New York City plan. And in case you didn't know it, we have our own version of a reusable bag that'll help get you into plastic bag rehab too."