Holter Graham Wants You to Use a Friggin' Mug!

Let's get this figured out. Styrofoam--and/or polystyrene if you are trying to sound impressive and inclusive--is still really bad, but for totally different reasons than most people think.

Initially--a few decades ago--styrofoam was bad because its manufacture involved the use of Chloro-flourocarbons, or CFCs. And CFCs, when released into the atmosphere as the Styrofoam broke apart or broke down, would sail up into the sky, attach to pieces of Ozone, and pull them out of the Ozone Layer, allowing cancer-causing radiation waves to stream towards us from our 93 million mile-distant sun, raising skin-cancer risks and heating up the Antarctic, among other things.

Well, since the late seventies CFCs have been banned from sources like styrofoam and aerosol bottles. So, in that sense, styrofoam is safe now.

But we've been on this planet a while now, and we are very very messy tenants, and so styrofoam is now a new threat--landfill filler.

Styrofoam, for all intents and purposes, doesn't break down. Ever. There could very likely be a group of our descendants, thousands of years from now, who could dig up a landfill, reach down, grab a styrofoam cup, wash it off, and drink whatever strange protein-sludge they will drink to keep themselves alive on the gamma-blasted desert we leave them as our legacy.

Or, we could just use smarter stuff, and slow the urgent rate of landfill-closings in this country.

Try this: Use a Friggin Mug!

Is that so hard? Or how about this: get off your lazy duff, wash the dishes, and use them again.

Was that really so bad?

Modern dishwashers actually use very little water; certainly much less than you would standing there yourself washing the dishes. So just use a glass or a cup--both of which could be made from recycled glass or plastic--and then either give it a quick rinse and re-use it, or pop it into the dishwasher and re-use it. It's not that hard.

The most surprising thing about living green is that it really isn't that hard. It is just different from the wasteful and disrespectful way most of us live now--and I am not any more innocent than the rest of us (I have shameful memories of breaking styrofoam cups apart in the late seventies and screaming "Oh No, The Ozone Layer! The Ozone Layer!" with over-dramatic glee. I'm sorry.)

But the only difficult part is that first moment of change. Once you start the new momentum, it's really the same life we're living. A little change here, a little re-use there, and suddenly our descendants are running in green fields, instead of doing protein-sludge shots while they hide in opaque radiation-shielded domes during the cancer-causing height of their nuclear winter.

Just use a damn mug.

Want to know what you can do to reduce your carbon footprint? Find out on Planet Green TV's Wa$ted.