Connecticut Green Living

Tomorrow, June 21, join the environmentally friendly Make Music Day starting at 9 a.m. Eastern to participate in the international Fête de la Musique , taking place in over 1,000 cities across 120 countries. This Make Music Day, Bash the Trash Environmental Arts is raising awareness about trash pollution by building fun instruments from found objects. The organization has promoted, as it says on its website, building, performing & educating with musical instruments made from trash since 1991 . "These amazing instruments tackle issues of waste and offer us an opportunity to look at 'trash' in a new way," according to a statement. The daylong, musical free-for-all celebrates music in all its forms, encouraging people to band together and play in free public concerts. Over 85 U.S. cities and the entire states of Vermont, Connecticut , Hawaii and Wisconsin are participating in this year’s celebration, which will be virtual due to COVID-19 . Participants can joi...

Yesterday I realized what my county needs - free masks, widely distributed. Why isn't this being done? I boarded a bus to get to Milford to my doctor's appointment yesterday, an event so traumatizing that I had a nightmare the night before. The issue is not with the driver or how the bus companies have smartly set things up - rides are free because one cannot venture farther than a roped-off portion at the front - but dealing with other passengers. There are a few types: 1. The individual who is casual about his or her mask and just slowly puts it on when he or she has already boarded the bus; 2. The individual who is already wearing a mask and behaving in a civilized manner; 3. The individual who, for some inexplicable reason, is using the mask as an excuse to loud-talk with the driver, therefore spewing droplets as he/she speaks; 4. The person who is unaware of everything going on around them, perhaps for reasons of mental illness, including the requirement to wear a mask; ...

As I write this, Connecticut is suffering from a 2-3 percent reported infection rate of COVID-19 . The statistics are impossible to know exactly because not everyone who wants to be tested has been; others have not been tested for other reasons. In some cases the tests have been inaccurate. Despite the high rate of infection, many in our state refuse to wear masks as they are supposed to do when entering stores or when closer than six feet to another individual outside their home. A concern, too, is that people have misinformation about masks, that they are the be-all and end-all so if one is wearing so much as a homemade cloth mask or store-bought surgical mask, she can stand and chat at close range for several minutes with a friend or stranger at CVS. This is wrong. Surgical masks are only about 50 percent effective, according to Jill Crittenden, a research scientist with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who spoke on May 28 as part of a new series addressing COVID-19; this was ...