Dry clothes another way

Sure it's hard to live without a clothes dryer and some cities even ban clothes lines as unsightly but I love the look of clothes hanging off a line. And for me, I hang my clothes to keep them nice longer, no more shrunken jeans or faded t-shirts.
One friend lays her clothes over her lavender bush to dry- double duty- they dry and smell good. What could be better?

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Clothes Dryer?

Alexander P. Lee is executive director of Project Laundry List.
The tumble dryer is the second largest energy-consuming appliance and the leading cause of house fires among appliances. There is no such sense as an Energy Star dryer; these machines are inherently inefficient, using natural gas or electricity to heat air.
Look to Italy and Denmark for guidance.
In Italy, only about three or four percent of households own a dryer. In Denmark, newly constructed student housing included space for indoor drying. In China, the bamboo shaft is still a ubiquitous clothesline. In the United States, approximately 80 percent of households own a dryer. Project Laundry List believes, from anecdotal evidence, that the vast majority of families can see a 10 to 20 percent savings on their electric bill by going cold turkey and setting up a clothesline or drying rack.

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Reduce your risk for breast cancer

Research has found that the association between frequently eating cabbage and a significantly reduced risk of breast cancer is only seen with raw and short-cooked cabbage foods (steamed cabbage and sauerkraut)
To promote the production of the most glucosinolates, slice or chop your cabbage and let sit for 5-10 minutes before cooking, and cook lightly, steaming or sautéing for 5 minutes or less.

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Chemicals in Our Food, and Bodies

Op-Ed Columnist
Chemicals in Our Food, and Bodies
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 7, 2009

Your body is probably home to a chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA. It’s a synthetic estrogen that United States factories now use in everything from plastics to epoxies — to the tune of six pounds per American per year. That’s a lot of estrogen.
More than 92 percent of Americans have BPA in their urine, and scientists have linked it — though not conclusively — to everything from breast cancer to obesity, from attention deficit disorder to genital abnormalities in boys and girls alike.

Now it turns out it’s in our food.

Consumer Reports magazine tested an array of brand-name canned foods for a report in its December issue and found BPA in almost all of them. The magazine says that relatively high levels turned up, for example, in Progresso vegetable soup, Campbell’s condensed chicken noodle soup, and Del Monte Blue Lake cut green beans.

The magazine also says it found BPA in the canned liquid version of Similac Advance infant formula (but not in the powdered version) and in canned Nestlé Juicy Juice (but not in the juice boxes). The BPA in the food probably came from an interior coating used in many cans.

Published journal articles have found that BPA given to pregnant rats or mice can cause malformed genitals in their offspring, as well as reduced sperm count among males. For example, a European journal found that male mice exposed to BPA were less likely to make females pregnant, and the Journal of Occupational Health found that male rats administered BPA had less sperm production and lower testicular weight.

This year, the journal Environmental Health Perspectives found that pregnant mice exposed to BPA had babies with abnormalities in the cervix, uterus and vagina. Reproductive Toxicology found that even low-level exposure to BPA led to the mouse equivalent of early puberty for females. And an array of animal studies link prenatal BPA exposure to breast cancer and prostate cancer.

While most of the studies are on animals, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported last year that humans with higher levels of BPA in their blood have “an increased prevalence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and liver-enzyme abnormalities.” Another published study found that women with higher levels of BPA in their blood had more miscarriages.
Bottom line: stay away from canned food if you can!

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Help the planet, paint your roofs white.

Simply painting roofs white in warm climates decreases air conditioning bills for those buildings by 20 percent. That's one reason why California has required all new buildings to have white roofs for the past few years.
This new study says that if the 100 biggest cities painted all their roofs white, and switched their road materials to lighter colors (concrete instead of asphalt) it would reflect enough light and heat back into space to entirely offset the warming of the last few decades.

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