Sandal tan
If I have ever spoken with you, there are a few things you know about me: I like Tigers baseball, fresh produce, kugel, and sandal tans.
I take pride in my ability to carve a pattern into my pigment through a summer’s worth of exposure to the sun, only to have the Zorro sign fade over the winter. Well, now that I will be spending two years in a coastal climate, it’s time that we start tracking my progress.
In my family, mostly with my younger brother, there is a definite pride about the sandal tan. When he was working at an outdoor equipment store and the sales rep from Chaco came in for a presentation, my brother asked about the possibility of a Chaco tan promotion, or at least a prize for having the best Chaco tan in the room. The sales rep wasn’t as excited as my younger brother about the prospect for that type of promotion.
By the way, Chaco is one of the few companies to offer a discount to Peace Corps volunteers. I have done everything in these sandals: played basketball, gone running, climbed Gavea da Pedra in Rio, been rejected from entering a club in Buenos Aires (because I was wearing them), and led a six-day camping trip in Algonquin Park. These babies are unstoppable.
Here is the baseline that we will begin with. I look forward to revisiting this subject every month.
Biodegradable plastic bag
Every major supermarket chain in Ecuador promotes its plastic shopping bags as biodegradeable. It’s not that I am skeptical about this promotion, but I am interested to find out whether they actually are biodegradeable. Because I’ve always heard that it takes 1,000 years for a plastic bag to biodegrade, I think it might be a little misleading to promote your bags as biodegradeable.
But the small print on the bag says
1. This bag will biodegrade in 12 to 24 in land or in a landfill with exposure to oxygen, sun light….. (and something in Spanish that I don’t understand)
2. This product will biodegrade in 24 to 36 months in the presence of microorganisms in a landfill.
Well, that is considerably less than the 1,000 years I had heard it normally takes for these products to biodegrade. Let’s see how things go.
3 comments:
I love the chaco tan...I'm working on my reef tan. Not as cool as the Zorro "Z".
You should teach the country about reusable shopping bags.
Go for the tan..but use sunscreen please....that goes for YaYa too!
Love you,
Aunt shira
biodegradable plastic is an oxymoron. plastic can NEVER fully degrade. it can break down into small particles, but it will never ever go away. however, new plant-based biodegradable bags that are a lot like plastic bags may meet the quoted statistics, and are sometimes called plastic bags for convenience sake.
also, i don't know about south american landfills, but american landfill conditions mean conditions under which anything in them will break down as little as possible (the opposite of what is publicly assumed)
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