I was driving around the other day when I spied a minivan with a peculiar message.

Wait — cooking oil “filtration”? But why would you — is that a french fry character with a boil on his cheek?

It is? And the sweat . . . is cooking oil? He’s sweating cooking oil? But — I’m going to have to go to the website and make sure this isn’t what I think it is.

Since 1996, the Filta Group has been providing unparalleled service around the world to restaurants and other food establishments. Filta’s “Green” services naturally preserve the environment by extending the life of cooking oil with the FiltaFry service, and reducing energy consumption and food waste with the FiltaCool product. Filta services over 5,000 customers every week and has recycled over 250 million pounds of oil!

Recycled oil? Oh, I get it, you mean, like you clean out a fryer and then give the cooking oil to one of those people who has jury rigged their car to run on cooking oil, right? Really, what you mean is “reuse” or “repurpose,” not “recycling,” I see. Phew. Wait. Why is “Green” in scare quotes? Really it should be “recycling” that is in scare quotes, right? Why I am getting a bad feeling from this? Oh good, there’s a video. I’m sure this will make me feel better.

Wait, one step of your “six step process” of cleaning the oil is “arriving on site”? What are the other six steps — “ask the receptionist if she’s busy after work?” “Get parking stub validated”? Do any of these six steps involve throwing the cooking oil away and putting in fresh oil? Surely no reputable company would use this service. Uh oh. Client endorsements from PF Changs, DoubleTree, Chick-Fil-A, and (gasp) California Pizza Kitchen?! And you know these are just the companies who are willing to cop to it! That’s it, I’m never eating out again.

I bet you kids are too young to remember when McDonald’s got busted for using runoff fat from their burgers to fry their french fries, right? Well how is this much better, I ask? Just because it’s run through some “machine” that says it’s better? That removes “virtually all of the carbon material” from the oil before it’s put back for reuse? How about we remove ALL OF THE CARBON MATERIAL by buying new oil every time? Has the world gone mad?

"Still More Evidence That The Green Movement Is Fucking Gross And Hazardous To Your Health" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Personal Finance and was originally posted on December 18, 2009. Copyright ®2009 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

People, we have a saying out here — if the disposable diaper ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

But you crunchy granolas are always fiddling with things. You can’t just leave well enough alone, can you? This is the only explanation I can find for The Diaper Free Baby, aka Elimination Communication, a third option in the age-old cloth diaper versus dispasable diapers debate — WAIT, hold the fuck up, didn’t we pretty much settle this one already? Aren’t disposable diapers, regardless of their environmental impact, eleventy billion times preferrable to cloth ones? Aren’t we willing to have the diaper be one of those times where we use a resource and throw it away? Is there somebody left in the world who doesn’t agree with this? Has this person been evaluated by a psychiatrist recently? What was I talking about?

Oh yes, I was talking about Elimination Communication, a new movement that allows you to skip diapers altogether! by tapping into a mother’s natural instinct to hold her child over an excrement receptacle when elimination is imminent! Apparently, this is something we know how to do instinctively, probably because of the fact that we don’t like to be pissed on! Huzzah!

Oh yes: Elimination Communication promises to foster a very special, very poop-centered and mostly one-sided conversation with your preverbal children about when and why they need to take a leak. You see, it’s all about communication, and it turns out that pressuring your three-month-old to be done with diapers already! not only allows you to save time, money, and the environment, but also allows you to get back all of those mornings you wasted not having to change crib sheets that are soaked in urine!

The magic of the diaper free baby began when Ingrid Bauer, Elimination Communication’s guru, visited India and noticed that mothers were carrying around diaperless babies “fearlessly and with what seemed liked virtually no ‘accidents.’” Now, personally, I go for no accidents, sans qualifiers and scare quotes, with my child’s excrement concerns, but I’m sure that this is just my First World bias betraying itself again here. If I would only learn to hold Mini “over an appropriate receptacle when that need should arise,” then I would be able to live in harmony with the threat of urine being leaked all over me all day Awesome! What a totally revolutionary and totally worth it way of helping the environment. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go buy Ingrid Bauer’s book, Diaper Free: The Gentle Wisdom of Natural Infant Hygiene. I’ll be needing something to protect my lap while I’m on this new poop crusade.

"Yet Another Piece of Evidence I Did Not Need That The Green Movement Is Fucking Gross And Overly Obsessed With Excrement" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Personal Finance and was originally posted on December 04, 2009. Copyright ®2009 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Oh, green. Green, you have gone wrong. I’m sure people have been doing this since the beginning of time, but to create a cottage industry out reusable toilet paper, and call them “family wipes”? Nononononononononono, Greenies! Wallypop is a company that you might have heard of before, but just in case you haven’t, they make Family Wipes, a disposable toilet paper alternative.

Wallypops Family Wipes.

Which is refreshing, because I don’t know about you guys, but the burden I’ve felt from not having a means of reusing and recycling my toilet paper has been a KILLER. And also, because nothing says family togetherness like cutting up a bunch of old pediatric nurse uniforms, sewing them into squares, and using them as a conduit that allows you to share your fecal matter with the rest of your family members via butt cloth.

"Still Another Piece of Evidence That The Green Movement Is Not Only Pretentious, Annoying, Sick and Macabre, But Also Just An Excuse To Be Cheap And Gross" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Personal Finance and was originally posted on November 13, 2009. Copyright ®2009 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

I'm not sure where to start with the problems here.

This, friends, is a teddy bear made out of a placenta.

We already know that the green movement is pretentious and annoying. Now it appears that the green movement also has a sick and macabre side as well. Alex Green, an artist with a delightfully convenient name, was inspired to create her “Twin Teddy Kit” for a special design exhibition featuring “sustainable play design” called “Doing It For The Kids.” The exhibition was sponsored by [re]design, a green design website, as well as some corporate sponsors who must not have realized how far some people are willing to take the notion of “sustainable.” Not to mention what some people might think is appropriate for children to play with.

Has there been a misunderstanding somewhere? Placentas are a renewable resource, Ms. Green. We needn’t worry ourselves with reusing them so much, they get quite a bit of use in the primary function, and are usually more than happy to be laid to rest in the giant red biohazard bin directly after the baby is delivered. Or is the problem that we have run out of plush material? Can somebody get Tim Gunn on the phone? I’m sure that Mood has something in a cashmere or a “Minkie Soft” fabric that you might consider subbing in for the PLACENTA that has been STITCHED TOGETHER in the form of a teddy bear here. Far be it from me to make a cheap pun, but have you considered thinking outside of the box on this one?

According to Inhabitots, the genius of the placentabear is that it “celebrates the unity of the infant, the mother and the placenta.” The thing is, there is no “unity” between the infant, the mother, and the placenta, at least not once the baby and the placenta are outside of the mother’s body. I don’t care how “sustainable” you want your design to be, a used placenta does NOT belong in a sweatshop factory loft in downtown Los Angeles waiting to be made into a pattern — oh, and probably not a good idea to put it near your kid’s head, either, particularly not if you have dogs at home. And here’s another tip: if you need to encase your baby toy in glass to keep away flies, it’s probably not the best choice for a baby gift. But don’t worry, you’ll pick these things up as time goes on: nobody starts out being an expert at parenting.

I sharpen dead people.

And the Serial Killer Chic trend in green design doesn’t stop there! I featured this Pencil Box Made Out of Dead People on ABDPBT Commodity Fetishism as part of my exposé on products for which there is simply no excuse, but it bears repeating here. Because there are limits to what we can reasonably expect even the most environmentally concerned citizen to adopt as part of their life. And turning a loved on into a pencil box with pencils stamped with their name, maybe it sounds like poetry to you when you’re hocked up on scat on some artists retreat, or if your eyes are all black like those people on True Blood, listen I don’t know. What I do know: this is sick. If you put this in your house, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you are sick. And that it’s just a matter of time before you start killing and torturing small animals, or price-comparison shopping for clown suits.

Which is more disturbing -- the box, or the people who like the box?

"2 More Pieces of Evidence I Didn’t Need That The Green Movement Is Not Only Pretentious And Annoying, But Also Sick and Macabre" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Personal Finance and was originally posted on October 14, 2009. Copyright ®2009 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

I’m going to start a movement called Purple, and it will be all about using shit one time and then throwing it away.

We will champion the cause of the common man/woman who has a simple goal of putting his unwanted crap in a landfill. And we will reward him for doing it by building a park on top of that landfill for future generations to enjoy. We will charge you more for new furniture than for furniture made from “reclaimed” materials, because of course things that are new should cost more than things that are already used. We will force people to use disposable diapers because cloth diapers are nasty and why are you putting a pin–safety or otherwise–so close to your baby’s private parts when you don’t have to? We also will encourage people to remember that white is white, and not a brown dingy off-white color, and that things like laundry detergent are 1) supposed to be purchased in stores; and 2) smell good, like a fresh summer breeze in a chemical plant, so that you don’t have to actually smell the world around you. Because the world around you stinks.

And to make sure this movement really catches on, I’m going to recruit John McCain–because this will be a bipartisan movement, of course–I will get John McCain to make a video of himself pontificating on the fact that recycling is lame and mostly a waste of time. The video, “The Most Convenient of Truisms,” will feature John McCain reading a script that I’ve written for him where he talks about how most of the shit you do to recycle uses up more resources than it saves, and that we mostly just do this crap to make ourselves feel better, and that every couple of years there’s some new thing that tells you to switch whatever you were doing to a different way and then start all over again. And that every time you do this, this leads to even more wasted resources, and it’s all a bunch of trendy hullabaloo anyway.

Like this stupid display I saw at Starbucks yesterday. First of all, plastic swizzle sticks, Starbucks? You do know that we’ve heard of these before, right? Because you can call them “splash sticks” all you want, and put a little wave of coffee aroma on the top, but isn’t that just like putting lipstick on a plastic swizzle stick? You know who else has plastic swizzle sticks, Starbucks? Who has had them since I was–I don’t know–two years old, sitting on my grandmother’s knee while she chainsmoked? McDonald’s. That’s right: McDonald’s has plastic swizzle sticks. So congratulations. You’ve now copied McDonald’s and blamed it on us.

And this “feature” that these sticks are reusable? Yeah. I get that, but now you expect me to carry around a plastic swizzle stick for the whole rest of the day? Which the chance of me doing? Is less than zero. In fact, you know what I’m going to do, Starbucks? I’m going to take one of your splash sticks, use it, and then ceremoniously throw it away. Right in front of you. What are you doing to do about it? Call the green police on me? Do you honestly think that I’m any less likely to throw away this “splash stick” than I was the wooden stick you used to have? Guess again.

"Further Evidence I Didn’t Need That The Green Movement Is Pretentious and Annoying" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT Personal Finance and was originally posted on September 04, 2009. Copyright ®2009 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.