If the only thing you’re more tired of than Valentine’s Day is all those tips for how to green your Valentine’s Day, take heart. You can hate on Hallmark and smug couples while still showing your mad hot love for the Earth. Here’s our guide to celebrating Singles Awareness Day in eco-style.
1. Get back in black. Wear your broken heart on your sleeve with the only appropriate color for this day. To rock the greenest dreary duds, buy secondhand. Better yet, loot the closet of a friend out enjoying an overpriced night at the Olive Garden.
2. Put on your rose-colored glasses. And by that we mean drink. Vodka is the companion that always loves you back (although some might quibble that revisiting you over the toilet isn’t “love”). Since vodka and bourbon are corn-based — involving pesticides, genetically modified organisms, and the wrath of Michael Pollan — consider springing for organic. Word on the street is that organic booze gives you less of a hangover, too, and S.A.D. is the perfect day to do some drinking in the name of scientific research. GreenMuze has a rundown of eight organic vodkas, and four get tasted and reviewed here. There are also some tasty organic dark brews out there, or sip some organic Scotch. Just ease up before you find yourself belting out “All By Myself” Bridget Jones-style.
3. Indulge. Everybody likes chocolate — it’s a great projectile! — but there’s nothing sweet about child labor or worker exploitation. Before you curl up with your bottle and your box of chocolates, make sure you treat yourself to the conscientious kind. A Gristy taste test of fair trade and/or organic chocolate deemed Rapunzel chocolate the winner, followed closely by Equal Exchange and Endangered Species. Siel, aka GreenLAGirl, recommends SLO’s organic chai chocolate. Or you could get it on with an activist … kit from Global Exchange, with chocolates and educational valentines to spread the word about fair trade.
4. Cure for what emails you. Now that you’ve loosened up with a drink or two, cheer up your equally single or recently heartbroken friends with snarky electronic wordplay. Some ECards has sarcastic encouragement and snide humor, or send a punny hookup invite. Better still, create and email a tasteful Paint illustration of heartbreak.
5. A match unmade in heaven. Done cheering up others? Now cheer yourself up. Burning mementos may be the most cathartic method of disposal — but it might also be the worst for your health. If your old love letters are on glossy or colored paper, setting them aflame can create funky gases and, unfortunately, should be avoided. Ceremoniously dump them into the recycling bin instead, since inks and coatings are best — if anticlimactically — dealt with by a recycling center. And since burning that sentimental trinket can create cancer-causing dioxins, the trash is actually the best option if something can’t be recycled. Besides, it’d be a shame to call the fire department — if I Heart Huckabees taught us anything, it’s that fire trucks are not green.
6. Sexual healing. If you’re hot just like an oven and need some self-lovin’, keep the plastic out of your, er, pleasure. The PVC and phthalates in sex toys can contribute to reproductive issues for men and women — major turn-off. Instead, opt for joy toys made from glass, metal, or elastomer, a phthalate-free and latex-free alternative. For starters, Babeland sells eco-sex kits; green toys are also available from Smitten Kitten, Tantus, and Good Vibrations. And smooth operators should try organic lube, which lacks petrochemicals as well as parabens, the probable carcinogens lurking in many personal care products.
7. Hanky panky. At the end of the night, sop up your tears and spilled booze with an old-skool handkerchief or recycled facial tissues. And remember, intelligent and charming reader: it’s snot you, it’s them.
