Yesterday was sunny, warm and all the streets were clear for a quick six-minute trip to one kids’ preschool. It was so nice to be back out on the bike with a baby who actually likes riding in the back (unlike last summer with the non-stop screaming.)

I was happy to see that the city of Montreal estimates that leaving your bike at home one day a week instead of commuting to work will reduce your greenhouse gas emissions by 232kg per year.  You can read more here.

Earth Hour is tonight from 8 to 9 p.m. wherever you live.

Think you’ll be bored in an hour without electricity? Here are some suggestions to keep you busy:

1. Read
2. Play board games
3. Knit
4. Talk to your significant other. Who know what that could lead to…
5. Play with your kids
6. Sing
7. Play an instrument
8. Draw
9. Sleep
10. Go for a walk
11. Montreal Canadiens’ fans: listen to the game on a battery-powered radio
12. Eat chocolates and peanut-butter sandwiches

As I was breastfeeding my toddler for what felt like the umpteenth time yesterday, I started to try to think about the postive aspects of nursing forever and ever amen. This is what I am going to try to focus on instead of trying to figure out why this baby just does not want to be weaned. (Her favourite thing seems to be chanting ”na na na na” while trying to jump onto my chest from the floor.)

Here are five reasons breastfeeding is good for the planet:

1. It produces no garbage.

2. It doesn’t have to be shipped from a factory, burning fossil fuels and creating greenhouse gases.

3. It doesn’t require the production of bottles, bottle liners, nipples, or formula containers.

4. Breast milk is a renewable resource.

5. It requires no energy (except for what the mother’s body uses to make all that milk, but hey all those calories burned by breastfeeding help that pregnancy weight come off!)

I feel like I’ve been nursing a baby forever — well, for a good part of the last eight years anyway. Since my first baby was born, I’ve noticed that more and more women breastfeed, and they do it publicly without having to drape themselves in sheets and blankets to hide what they’re doing. Although my hairdresser still tries to get me to go into a different room to nurse the baby if she wants a snack while I’m getting a haircut. It seems some of the older customers aren’t so into breastfeeding in public.

This week, a Montreal neighborhood began handing out stickers to local businesses that welcome breastfeeding mothers. I hope that means an end to places that expect women to nurse their babies in the bathroom. How gross is that?

You can read more about the new stickers — like the image you see above — in a story from La Presse here.

Last year, we began to try to buy toilet paper and paper towels that were made only from recycled paper. (I know, I know, we shouldn’t use paper towels. I’m working on it!!)

According to Greenpeace Canada, if each household in Canada replaced 1 roll of virgin toilet paper with just one roll of recycled toilet paper, it would save 47,962 trees.

It isn’t always easy, with the limited amount of information that companies put on their packaging, to figure out which brand of paper products is greener.  Some were obvious — like the individually-wrapped plastic-covered mega-rolls we used to buy at Costco. We stopped buying those, opting for the ones that said they were made from recycled paper. But it wasn’t clear which was the greenest. Some said they were made with recycled paper, others said post-consumer fibres, some had packages made of recycled material, others said they were biodegradable. Some just had green colours on their packages.

Thanks to Greenpeace Canada, now I know which ones to put in my shopping cart. Their campaign to preserve Canada’s boreal forest includes a guide to greener toilet paper products sold in Canada, and which ones to avoid. You can see it here.

And the last time we were at Costco, we found the Cascades brand recycled-paper toilet paper, so that’s what we’re stocking up on now. Here’s a story from the Globe and Mail about how Cascades is tooting its green horn after years of hiding the fact that it used recycled paper in its products.

These rolls of paper are all green

Normally quiet Cascades Inc. wants to shout out to its customers that its recycled paper products are truly good for the environment

RICHARD BLACKWELL

When an Ottawa consulting firm conducted a study of the environmental claims of 1,018 consumer products sold in North American big-box stores, there was just one item that presented truly accurate information: a package of paper towels from Quebec paper company Cascades Inc.

  Those paper towels really are made from 100-per-cent recycled material, TerraChoice Environmental Marketing Inc. found, and they are biodegradable and compostable.
Every other product surveyed – all 1,017 of them – made one or more unsupportable marketing claims.

  Cascades, a quiet player in Canada’s huge paper industry, is about to boost its profile to try to take advantage of its long-time, and pristine, environmental record.

  For years, most of Cascades’ consumer products – paper towels, toilet paper, and napkins – hid behind private-label brands. But with a new environmental sensibility pervasive in the marketplace, the company wants to flaunt its green credentials by expanding sales of products sold under its own name. 

People around the world are making plans to shut off their electricity for an hour on March 29 (that’s two weeks from tonight) in a global statement against global warming. More than 32,000 Canadians – including our family – have already pledged to turn off their lights between 8 and 9 p.m., local time.

Last year, more than 2 million people in Sydney, Australia, switched off. This year, the movement has gone global and Montreal is one of the cities that is taking part.

You can learn more about Earth Hour here. That blue dots on that globe above represent people who’ve pledged to join in Earth Hour. You can see an updated globe here.

Spread the word.

This would be one of the many squirrels that has discovered the buffet at our backyard compost bin. Hard to see the bins, buried under the 26cm of snow that fell here on Saturday night.

But what hungry squirrel would let 26cm of snow keep them from a tasty snack? Not this one, who dug a path down through the snow into the bin yesterday. That’s the very tip of his tail, sticking out of the snow while he dumpster dives.

Victory! He found something to eat.

 Don’t you hate that feeling when you open up your mailbox, pull out a handful of mail, all excited, only to discover that it’s almost all junk mail?

 We get so much of it, either delivered by our letter carrier, or dropped off twice a week in plastic bag full of ads or hand-delivered by local advertisers. It nearly all goes straight into our recycling bin, making me wonder how many trees were cut down to go into our recycling bin. According to the Clean Calgary Association, that would be more than 31 million trees.

My husband likes to take the unsolicited mail that comes to our house — things like credit card applications — and return them to the sender in their own self-addressed pre-paid envelope, with a note asking them to stop sending junk mail.

Last week we said enough was enough and got ourselves one of the little no-junk mail stickers you can see above. Ever since we stuck ours on our mailbox, we’ve been seeing them everywhere. On one Montreal street last week, it seemed like nearly every door in the row of duplexes had a sticker on the door.

You can get the stickers for free at Eco-quartier offices in Montreal. To find your nearest Eco-quartier, go here. You can also make your own sign. (We had one before, but it faded pretty quickly in this neverending winter we’ve been having.) Canada Post says it will respect the signs and no longer deliver unaddressed mail to your address.

You can read about a new Canadian campaign to ban junk mail here.

Ever since our family did a one-week garbage-free experiment last summer, I’ve been trying to keep our kids’ packed lunches and snacks as litterless as possible. The average Canadian kid’s lunch (like the one pictured above) is estimated to create about 30 kg of waste each year. I’d been at the kids’ schools at lunch and snack time and had been surprised by the amount of garbage being produced.

We have piles of reusable plastic containers, water bottles, real cutlery and cloth napkins that the kids are very good about returning in their lunch boxes each day. We also have a plastic bento-box style lunch kit that is great for lunches. We got ours as gifts from Laptop Lunches and they are sturdy, clean easily and can carry a lot of food for a hungry kid.

We also try not to pack individually-wrapped foods such as granola bars or cheese sticks. The kids take juice boxes from time to time, but usually have water or juice in a reusable bottle. They bring home any small plastic sandwich bags or snack-size bags to be recycled. It would be nice if our older child’s elementary school could provide recycling facilities in the lunchroom, but that’s something I hope to raise with the school shortly.

Here’s a picture of one of our kids’ lunches that I made last week:

Yes, it’s true, she has a paper napkin but that’s because all the cloth napkins were in the laundry that day!! Besides, she brought it home and it went straight into the compost.

I also picked up stainless-steel water bottles for the kids to use after reading several reports raising concerns about dangerous chemicals leaching from plastic water bottles into water. They love them, but they were a bit pricey so every time they leave the house they get a “Don’t lose your water bottle!!” reminder. So far, so good….

For the first time since we got our outdoor compost bins, we are adding green waste like fruit and vegetable peels to it all winter long. It has kept the family of squirrels living in the maple tree in our back yard very happy as they have everything from canteloupe rinds to avocado skins to munch on in the cold dead of winter.

But this is what the bins look like now:

We had decided just to shut down the bins for the rest of the winter and start composting again in the spring once everything thaws and we can take out the new compost from the bottom of the bins and spread it over our garden. But after three days of throwing out egg shells, used Kleenexes, apple cores and banana peels, we had to stop. The guilt was overwhelming – we couldn’t believe how many bags of garbage were leaving the house.

So we decided to bring in the big guns — a pound of worms. We picked them up from our local Eco-quartier office where a couple of hours after I called they had them waiting for us in a plastic yogurt container. The little wigglers cost us $15 and provided no end of  amusement for our kids, who were making up songs about their new pets on the trip to pick them up.

We had an indoor worm composting system years ago when we lived in an apartment, and still had the bin that the worms used to live in. We filled it up with shredded newspaper and moistened it with water:

Then, we unleashed the worms. You can watch the worms arrive in their new home here. Click on the picture below or here.

We’ve fed them once and it seems some of the worms are smarter than others. The smart ones are already eating the fresh worm food, the no-so-smart ones are still in the little pile of compost they came in. 

We’ve yet to see if the worms can handle all our green waste. We’re saving some of it to take to my parents’ place in the country this weekend. They have a big compost pile in their back yard, so we’ll dump a few plastic containers of green waste on theirs and let the worms do their magic on the rest here.

There’s an interesting story in today’s Montreal Gazette about the impact of idling your car. Besides polluting and wasting fuel, it also damages the car engine because newer cars are designed in order not to have to be idled before you start driving, even in the winter.

Idle Threat

Bylaw rarely enforced. Only 106 out of 1.3 million tickets issued last year were for idling

Andy Riga, The Gazette

With some exceptions, it’s illegal to idle your car for more than three minutes in Montreal. But don’t worry too much about getting a ticket for the infraction.

In 2007 – the first year the bylaw was on the books in most boroughs – only 106 tickets were handed out for illegal idling. Of those, just two were in the downtown Ville Marie borough, the area with the heaviest traffic and most motorists needlessly idling.

They were among the 1.3 million tickets given for non-moving violations across the island.

Despite the low number of tickets, Alan DeSousa, the city executive committee member responsible for the environment, said he thinks the bylaw has reduced idling and raised awareness about its detrimental effects. The practice wastes fuel, causes pollution and creates greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

If Montrealers are ever going to break the idling habit, however, experts suggest the first steps will be to debunk persistent myths about car engines and to convince motorists they should forego the luxury of toasty cars.

The rest of the story is here.