Friday, May 9, 2008

Celebrity eco warriors

In the last year, I've been reading more helpful comments from the celebrity eco set. For years, I've been amused with the extremes of Ed Begley Jr and Leonardo Di Caprio's Prius when he's not out with his posse scouting the chicas. But now, I have to admit that some of the soap box meanderings are getting on my nerves.
I'm usually the one who goes a little overboard with the recycling. I make sure to dig out the soap box or the shampoo bottle Husband threw in the trash to put in the recycling bins. Recently, I went to the 'net to find out who takes the deep fryer oil I have so I can make sure it gets to be biofuel (no one wants to cop to it). Lately, I try to only do my errands on days when Boy has school at the academy so that I can conserve fuel in my SUV.
But, seriously, some of the advice is contradictory and some times, not really realistic, that these eco celebrities are mouthing off in the magazines or on tv.
Some time ago, I read that Cameron Diaz believed that you should not rinse off your dishes before popping them into the dishwasher. And I'm sure that she and her staff do that. But they also probably have a much better dishwasher than I do. Because when I've missed a bit of stickiness on my dishes, it requires me an extra 15 minutes of scrubbing in the sink after I've run the dish through the dishwasher because it's now baked on. How much water is getting wasted now?
Another piece of advice I got from another mag and a celebrity Mom is that I should have a stack of a dozen dishcloths for the sole purpose of wiping up messes rather than go through the Costco sized Bounty paper towels that I buy for that purpose. So I tried that. I ended up going through all dozen in half a day and having to do an extra two loads of laundry that week. Sorry, landfill, I'm putting Boy's Huggies and the Bountys in you. Which means more water gets 'wasted' and I'm using more laundry detergent (sorry, the eco stuff doesn't do a great job of getting orange strawberry banana juice out of towels). Next?
It's sort of difficult for me to take with a straight face all the eco celebrities who spout of on the environment and what they are doing to protect it when I sort of wonder if they are really practicing what they preach. I'm sure they tell their staff to do so but what happens when Celebrity X goes off to Larry King Live to preach during April's eco awareness month? Do they come home and dig through the trash to see if their maids only used cloth to wipe up messes rather than that Costco container of Bounty like I do? Do they really send their nannies out to buy the eco friendly diapers at Whole Foods and think that the nanny is changing them all the time? Or that they use those cloth diapers religiously so that the maid can wash them? Or have the service pick them up?
Real life is a far more challenging proposition when you don't have a staff.

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