Happy eco-weekend
Check out the EcoArts Festival going on all day Saturday and Sundy, and take this opportuntiy to clean out your medicine cabinet. What do the two have to do with each other? They're both in this post.
There are two eco-oriented events this weekend that Earth to Philly wants to tip you to, and after some head-scratching on how to get them across I'm just going to mash them together into this one post.
First and foremost, if you're anywhere near Manayunk, be sure to check out the EcoArts Festival going on all day Saturday and Sundy, including an Eco Car Show, the Environmental EcoArtists exhibit along the Manayunk Towpath and Canal, the Philly Film & Music Festival, The Art of Recycling Rain Barrel Project and plenty of fun for kids and their relatives. Earth to Philly will be represented, maybe by only me, but we'll be there in some form!
Secondly, something you can do for the Earth and for your overloaded medicine cabinet is to ditch any medications you've had sitting around for a while, which you know you're not going to use because either you no longer have the condition they were prescribed for or you figure they've probably gone "off" by now. Clean those out and take them to a DEA drop-off point for the National Take-Back Initiative to be safely disposed of
(drop-off is usually at your local police district headquarters - find your closest location here). Drugs that are flushed down the toilet or sent to landfills are definite contaminants, and with all forms of those on the rise, anything we can cut back on is a planetary benefit.
Of course, one bottle of pills leaching into the soil may pale in comparison to the drugs-in-the-environment harm being constantly wrought by two sources with impunity. One is cigarette buts, containing up to 600 ingredients, known and unknown, that have everything to do with keeping smokers hooked on nicotine and nothing to do with eco-responsibility (and don't even get us started on the filters). The other is the routine application of antibiotics to healthy farm animals nationwide, which various sources have warned can spawn dangerous superbugs, with some reporting they may already have.
These are big problems that need addressing whenever drugs and the earth are mentioned in the same sentence, and if you can recolve them both this weekend, that would be great. If not, well, at least ditch the old drugs you don't need, and then go to Manayunk for info and entertainment by the eco-Schuylkill.