What was that line from Days of Our Lives, soap opera? “Like sands through the hourglass, these are the bowls of our lives.” Now, I own a bowl I never dreamed would be part of my life and even better, I feel great living green and walking the talk. No, I was not about to buy the new toilet from Sink Positive. I give that company a lot of credit for greening their toilets so that when you use the sink on top of the tank, that grey water is used for toilet flushes. I get it… up to the point that I’m supposed to brush my teeth over the toilet. One day I know it will be all the rage but until then, in terms of my green credibility in your eyes, have I been demoted to a lime green from forest green? Maybe I can persuade you.

I’ve had one toilet in the house that has been broken for a few months and was avoiding buying a new one. My brother said, “Hey, Mr.Green, how ’bout a toilet that’s reaaaaaaaalllllllllyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy   green.”

Hence my new toilet, with a dual flush feature. What the heck is that? Toto makes a 2 flush button toilet.  This kimono will help you flush less water when going #1 and a little more water for those more robust #2’s.

I was already imagining a guest coming over, having too much to drink and getting very confused by two buttons on a toilet. Especially guys. Don’t give us too many choices, we just shut down.

My Review:

1.) Seat: The toilet comes with a world class seat or cover ($80) [whatever you call it]. Not sure what makes a toilet seat world class. I never thought of putting the words world class and toilet seat in one sentence. I like the way the seat auto closes in that ever so cool slow moving classy way, after you flush. Never slams down.  I dig it so much after getting a garbage can that after you toss something away, and remove your foot from the door opener, you release, and it’s just too smooth the way that cover gently closes. I know, it’s a guy thing.

2.) Inside Bowl: The water level is low, so if you’re a guy and you like to stand, you better be one-shot Johnny or hope you have perfect aim. Most all guys know that ladies get all worked up when guys spray and walk away.

3.) Dual Flush: You have 2 flush buttons, 1 or 2. Yes, the numbers explain it all, don’t they. Your guests who use the toilet will just hit any button. They will not know the difference between 1 or 2. So if you have a lot of guests, you might put up a sign.

5.) Noise. Sounds like a regular toilet flush to me. Nowhere near the industrial toilets that I fear could detach my yoohoo appendage if I flushed while sitting down.

I did go out to look for one like at the regular stores in my neighborhood.  What’s up with Lowes and Home Depot? They have their toilets up high and mounted on the wall so you can’t inspect. Oh yeah, toilets are the hottest shoplifting items I can think of…oh sure.

Funny story, not related to Toto. Did you hear about the puppy that was flushed down the toilet and survived? Unreal..he didn’t drown. Great story with some great footage of the puppy in the tube.

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Did you see the shocking story on 60 Minutes about the ship breaking beaches of Bangladesh? At first I thought the story was horrible, then my emotions fell downward to anger as I watched a nightmare on television.

Let me digress quickly about my journey of joy, living green, and assessing my emotions every eco-step of the way. This was the first green story ever, that truly boiled my insides morphing from anger, as I just mentioned, to a nightmare. Have you had one of these episodes where you can’t think of anything else and can’t feel anything but the ache in your belly for people less privileged than you?

What do you do with those emotions in the moment? I directed myself to Webster’s dictionary to define what I was initially feeling, which was the emotion of viewing people like you and me in horrible conditions. Then the story made me physically nauseated, leading to my labeling this story an utter nightmare.

nightmare
–noun
a terrifying dream in which the dreamer experiences feelings of helplessness, extreme anxiety, sorrow, etc.

horrible
–adjective
causing or tending to cause horror; shockingly dreadful; a horrible sight.

If you missed the story, here’s the short of it.

We all know how ships are born, how majestic vessels are nudged into the ocean with a bottle of champagne. But few of us know how they die. And hundreds of ships meet their death every year.

From five-star ocean liners, to grubby freighters, literally dumped with all their steel, their asbestos, their toxins on the beaches of some the poorest countries in the world, countries like Bangladesh.

You can’t really believe how bad it is there, until you see it. It could be as close as you’ll get to hell on earth, with the smoke, the fumes, and the heat. The men who labor there are the wretched of the earth, doing dirty, dangerous work, for little more than $1 a day.

It’s not much of a final resting place, this desolate beach near the city of Chittagong on the Bay of Bengal. Ships are lined up there as at any port, but they’ll never leave. Instead, they will be dissected, bolt by bolt, rivet by rivet, every piece of metal destined for the furnaces to be melted down and fashioned into steel rods. The ships don’t die easily - they are built to float, not to be ripped apart, spilling toxins, oil and sludge into the surrounding seas.

The men who work there are dwarfed by the ships they are destroying. And they dissect the ships by hand. The most sophisticated technology on the beach is a blowtorch. The men carry metal plates, each weighing more than a ton, from the shoreline to waiting trucks, walking in step like pallbearers, or like members of a chain gang. They paint images of where they would like to be on the trucks - pictures of paradise far from this wasteland.

And when night falls, the work continues and the beach becomes an inferno of smoke and flames and filth.

This industry, which employs thousands and supplies Bangladesh with almost all its steel, began with an accident - a cyclone to be precise. In 1965, a violent storm left a giant cargo ship beached on what was then a pristine coastline. It didn’t take long before people began ripping the ship apart. They took everything and businessmen took note - perhaps they didn’t need a storm to bring ships onto this beach here.

Mohammed Mohsin’s family has become extremely wealthy bringing ships onto these beaches. He pays millions of dollars for each ship and makes his profit from the steel he sells. The name of his company is PHP, which stands for Peace, Happiness, and Prosperity.

One of the single most valuable parts of the ship is the propeller. The “small” ship’s propeller is worth around $35,000 alone, Mohsin estimates. “It is the west’s garbage dump,” says Roland Buerk, who lives in Bangladesh. He spent a year in these yards, writing a book about the industry. 60 Minutes hired him to guide Simon through the tangled world of shipbreaking.

To do the same work in America or England would be very expensive.

Bangladesh is one of the poorest nations in the world and desperately needs steel for construction but has no iron ore mines. The shipbreaking yards are its mines, providing 80 percent of the nation’s steel.

60 Minutes called this filthy beach, a gigantic recycling operation, also an environmental disaster.

IS THIS YOUR OPINION TOO? Do you mirror what GreenPeace feels?

The workers toil in tough conditions. They have no unions, no safety equipment, and no training. About 50 are said to die in accidents each year, often in explosions set off by blowtorches deep inside the fume-filled holds.

One of the workers mentioned sees casualties in the yards, men who were injured here but have no money to go anywhere else. The workers are housed in barracks with no beds, just steel plates scavenged from the ships they break.

Kids as young as 14 said they had worked there for over 2 years. Wow! My research proves that environmentalists have been doing battle with the industry for years. They say the west has no business dumping its toxic waste on impoverished lands in the east. They condemn the appalling work conditions, the low pay, and the lack of accountability for workers who are killed or injured.

Their most important proposal: that ships be cleaned of their toxic materials in the west, before they sail to Bangladesh.

That’s in line with an international ban which prohibits the shipment of hazardous waste from rich countries to poorer countries.

Rezwana Hasan of the Bangladeshi Environmental Lawyers Association said, “The shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh don’t respect even the most minimal environmental standards.”

Here’s the scary part. The owners of the yards argue that environmentalism is a luxury, reserved for the rich nations.

If this were the case in Bangladesh, no one would be working because no entity would stay in business. If you think ship breaking is a tragedy, you should learn how much teachers make there. In some cases, they don’t get paid at all. Women working in the garment industry are also underpaid and work in terrible conditions.

Here’s my 2 cents. Bangladesh must find reasonable alternatives for employment before they shut these entities down for not meeting minimum wage requirements. You certainly can’t shut down an education system altogether. And the garment factories have empowered the thousands of women working there.

One of my friends is from Bangladesh so I asked her what she thought.

She told me, “I can’t tell you that these people work so hard and are so very generous! They are the poorest country in the world and I know that they will give me the shirt off their back when I go there. (Even if it is their only shirt, and they will happily give it to me.) It saddens me so much to know that there are millions of these wonderful people that are put in such danger just to survive”

ARE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS SCANDAL?

Are we veering in the direction of ”look at these poor downtrodden slaves?” Do you think they’re ”miserable” people? As I looked closely at their faces I didn’t see the tension and anxiety of American corporate workers! They, Bangladesh workers who know nothing else and don’t particularly want anything else. They do work 7AM to 11PM with a two hour mid-day break, get paid a low but reliable income; their kids go to school (I saw no child workers in the yard; upper teens yes, children no)–and many somewhat cheerful faces–not necessarily happy, but not miserable. They work with their friends; all feel equal. They have little and little to worry about. The conditions are daunting but not wholly, the pace is calm and there are numerous periods of waiting during the day as the ship parts are taken apart. Is this not the horror show 60 Minutes portrayed. 60 minutes called this “dirty and rough.” Do you feel the converse, meaning the conditions are far from hell?

I get a bit sentimental sometimes and want to stop right here and thank you for sharing this wonderful metamorphosis of green growing within me at levels I’ve not experienced before. Your support is deeply rooted for me and I’m honored you visit Hart of Green.

You know, we as humans tend to feel quite fufilled by learning from a story that stirs emotion and teaches us something special. I think CBS is doing a great favor to American Capitalists with this piece. CBS is saying, look, be satisfied with your stagnant wages, no health care, ever increasing work hours away from family, your jobs being outsourced. Be satisfied with CEOs making 400% more than you do while you work longer and longer. You could be stripping ships.

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Posting options for today

• Most powerful guy in Iran is tweeting everyday. Wow! If he’s turned on to tweet, maybe we should be too?
• A Diesel Volkswagen is much more green than a Prius. I have proof.
• Write about a big solar panel sitting on a long steel rod in my backyard. Yeah. why not?

(Wait!…you either don’t care that the head of Iran is Tweeting or you don’t believe me….here’s the story if you need proof)

Now, on with this brief solar saga.  Have you ever looked at something and that double take pinches a nerve in your neck?

I was driving down my street behind my house and there was this enormously tall metallic rod that projects 30 feet high with a solar plate sitting on top.

To give you some context, I do not consider Concord, CA. to be green. Sure, the lovely Concordians recycle like green Californians do, but I’m sorry, this is no Seattle. The Emerald City is an icon of recycling. I remember when I was in Seattle in 1989 and recycling was in full force with righteous residents joyfully being green. Back then, I was really blown away by how eco-adamant most people were up there back in the day. Sort of like when you tell your parent, “now I know why that was so important to you back in the day, Mom”.

So, back to Concord. I called the city here and they told me they are going to place these rods with panels in the dividers across the city to power the irrigation sprinkler system that will feed the muffler exhaust blown flowers beneath it.

Is this cool or what? I am very proud of Concord for having the brass and swagger to stick a big ol’ grey metallic 30 foot pole in the center divide of a thoroughfare all to go green.

Just wait until this goes mass appeal and we can run down to K-Mart and pick up for $129, our very own panel to power the sprinklers in our front yards. Won’t it look pretty next to that gorgeous Dish stapled to the wall of your house? …………………………………NOT!

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I learned that $3.4 million of federal stimulus money is being used to build a tunnel to help turtles cross a Florida road. Look at that face.

How could you not spend a few million bucks on a face like that?
Do we hire a couple green turtle loving people to guide the turtles thru the tunnel?
How can we rely on turtles to know where the eco-hole under the eco-tunnel is positioned?

Hey, I’m just the new green guy wanting some logical understanding here.  Help a green brother out.

You know I did do my homework on this and found out they did the same thing at Paines Prairie in Gainesville, Texas and it cut back thousands of killed animals a year to under 200 or something. I think its a good idea, people always swerve when they see animals, it causes accidents (not to mention, people that never stop). Plus, the turtles were here first.

This eco-tunnel is just one of the projects in Florida that federal stimulus money will fund. Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma says he has scoured the stimulus list and found 100 questionable projects like Florida’s Eco-Tunnel project.

The tunnel will be built to keep turtles and gators off US-27 in Leon County and supporters say it will also protect drivers.

“When you got 30 and 40 pound turtles as large as a manhole cover and 12-foot alligators crossing a highway it is a public safety issue,” said Cliff Thaell, Commissioner-at-large of Leon County.

The White House issued a point-by-point rebuttal to Coburn’s report and the White House proved tracking all of the spending is not easy.

It defended spending $2.2 million on a project in Montana, but that project is not being funded with stimulus money.

Now, we have got to hire a couple people and make sure these turtles know where that hole is so they don’t crawl up on the road. Here’s the ad I placed today in the Miami paper.

CLASSIFIED AD: Miami Daily Tribune
Wanted……..Persons (2)to attend to and reposition misdirected or lost/confused turtles over newly constructed turtle bridge. No bathing or feeding required! Hours of employment: Depends on tidal schedule. Pay: Depends on prior turtle experience. Vegans only!

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A toilet with a sink on top of the tank. When I was waking up and rubbing the greenies out of my eyes while making coffee, I heard Sink Positive. Isn’t that cute. What is it?

I was still rubbing my eyes to see if I was hallucinating. No, this is real and within a few minutes I realized I’m just not green enough to spend $119.00 for this water saving toilet.

My first thought was “oh that’s gross, you mean the toilet water comes up and into the sink to wash my hands? Are we really ready to splash our face, brush our teeth in the morning over the toilet?

Does the sink “recycle” water?

Yes and no. The water running in the sink is clean tap water. The device simply provides access to clean water which is normally used to refill the toilet bowl. When used as a finger rinse, the water that drains from the sink is considered “grey water”, or used water. In this way, the bowl is refilled with grey water instead of clean water, which is considered recycling.

I know if you’re like me I just have to know what’s the real deal here with this wildly green toilet that’s made in America.

Where does the water drain?
Properly installed, the water drains to the toilet bowl, not into the tank.

Is the water clean?
Yes, the water comes directly form the water supply line. It is no different than the water from your faucet.

Benefits

Maximize water use
Using Sinkpositive eliminates the need for additional water use at the bathroom sink, and therefore, reduces the amount of waste water going down the drain. And, most importantly, the sink can help in the early detection of a water-guzzling, costly leak in the toilet’s plumbing.

Increased hand-washing frequency reduces hand-transmitted diseases
The immediate flow and convenient placement of a running faucet encourages all persons to obtain a fresh water hand wash or rinse which has been proven to break the chain of many hand transmitted diseases.

Eliminates touching faucet handles
The sink automatically runs with the toilet’s fresh water refill cycle after each flush meaning there are no knobs or handles to touch after hand washing reducing hand-transmitted diseases. Also, the elimination of faucet handles gives a welcome relief for persons with arthritis.

Tomorrow’s blog post should be a kick like this one. I’m still investigating why the city I live in placed an enormous solar plate erected 50 feet in the air on resting on a steel pole in this 4 foot divider of a 4 lane street. It looks bizzarre and I think it’s great. My city is trailblazing green living and I’m excited to see what thier up too.

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• "recyclable", "biodegradable" and "natural" don't always translate into sustainable by Jerry Hart So many topics to discuss. Brad Pitt's biodegrable body lotion, Tiger Woods is now like the rest of us, a real human being. America's dollar is weaker, China is building huge solar plants in Arizona and India will not buy our bonds, rather they buy more gold. Most of what I just said is not that......

• Beyond the Emergency Fund: Water, Water Everywhere, but Not a Drop to Drink This article is the first in a five-part series on preparing your household "Beyond the Emergency Fund." For five consecutive Mondays, we'll look at a variety of preparedness methods such as food and water storage, alternative power sources and ways to prepare for specific types of household emergencies. On the......
• Simple Greywater Recycling For Flushing Your Toilet. Don't know what greywater is? Imagine the water going down the drain in your bathroom - but finding one more use before heading out to the sewer. That, my friends, is greywater. It's not clean but yet it's not really dirty like toilet water, so why not recycle it again......
• How To Disinfect Without Using Toxic Chemicals. While there are all sorts of ways to clean up the germs around the house, most of them are terrible for both you and the environment. Just last week I wrote about how the most common version of "cleaning" is anything but! It is pure insanity that we use the......
• What's The Best/easiest Way To Hide The Wires Coming From/going To My Wall-mounted Tv? I recently mounted my 36" LCD TV and I've connected my Wii and DVD player to it, plus I have the TV's power cord and a VGA cable and audio cable to connect my laptop to it. That's 5 wires hanging down my wall under my TV. What's the easiest......
• How to Fix Your Bathtub Problems [/caption]For many people, the bathtub isn't just a way to get clean, it's an oasis away from the stress and worries that come with daily life. Whether you indulge in a luxurious bubble bath every night or just enjoy a good soak now and then, it's important to keep your......