Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
Decorations don’t have to be green to be green. Available for the past couple years at reasonable prices, LED options for holiday lighting are available alongside the standard mini-lights of the last 20 years. Unfortunately, most purchases are still mini-light strands. Using LEDs saves electricity, pure and simple. An equivalent strand of LED lights uses 80-90% less electricity than mini-lights and 99% less than the bigger (C7 or C9) lights common for many exterior decorations (those big bulb holiday lights).
If the US switched just 20% of the decoration lights this Christmas season, we would save 440 GWh of electricity, or about 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide based on the EPA national average of 1,363 lbs/MWh for electricity. That’s over More…
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
Of course the answer depends on a lot of factors about you, your surroundings and how you relate. I’ll share some average for the US and go into some basic ways to calculate this for you. I was quite shocked with the magnitude of the difference when I went through this exercise myself. Please don’t mistake me for saying we shouldn’t do more just because it doesn’t do as much. Every little bit helps. If you are like me, you can’t do as much as you want right now. Hopefully you can use these concepts to prioritize your actions and where best to apply your energy and resources.
For an average US household, the energy utilization is mainly around HVAC (Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning), Lighting, Cars, Refrigeration. The percentages from Wikipedia are:
32% space heating
13% water heating
12% lighting
11% air conditioning
8% refrigeration
5% electronics (includes computers)
5% wet-clean (mostly clothes dryers)
To calculate your annual cost (both environmental in terms of carbon footprint and economic in terms dollars) follow the steps below.
A house is a complex system of inter connected components. Most of us, myself included, only have gross utility usage from each source to gleam some useful information from. Even with just your gas bill (natural gas, heating oil, or propane) and electric bill you can calculate a reasonable estimate of major energy usage. If you use electricity for heating, hot water, clothes drying and cooling, then this becomes much harder and you may wish to have an expert do a home energy audit. Check with your electric company as they may offer this for free if you are really interested in conserving. Given that gas furnaces/boilers, hot water heaters and clothes dryers are much more efficient than equivalent electric models, you should consider switching if that is an option. Here is how you can calculate how much energy goes into heating, hot water More…
Thursday, October 11th, 2007
My wife thinks I’m nuts keeping these, but sometimes you’ve got to challenge the norms to make a difference. We’ve been saving popsicle sticks for a couple months now and use them for a number of things.
It was making me sick to see us throwing away all these little pieces of wood. I started savings them in hope of using them in future art projects with my kids (almost 3 now) but we have collected so many so fast that I have been forced to come up with other uses or given in to societal pressures and pitch them rather than pitching in. Since my kids are a few years away from building bird houses or bridges with popsicle sticks, I’ve found a bunch of other uses for them. Here are a few ideas More…
Saturday, September 15th, 2007
School has started for my 4th grader. I tried to be an environmentally-friendly school supply shopper, but it proved to be a little difficult at times. I could not, for the life of me, find wide-lined notebook paper or pronged 2-pocket folders with recycled paper content, so I was forced to purchase (gasp!) virgin paper. Another disappointment was the discontinuance of the Prang(C) soybean crayons (made with no petroleum products), so again, I was forced to go the environmentally-unfriendly route (i.e., Crayola(R)).
On the bright side, I did find spiral notebooks and Post-it(R) notes with recycled paper content. In addition, a number of supplies we kept from previous years followed the “reuse” point on the reduce-reuse-recycle triangle. These included: the plastic box for holding supplies (this has been in circulation for five years now), last year’s bottle of liquid glue, scissors, ruler, still good pens and #2 pencils, and, of course, the trusty old backpack.
As for lunches, a new lunch box was required because the old one was falling apart, but at least we don’t use disposable paper sacks. We also avoid plastic baggies by reusing old sour cream containers to put things in like grapes, trail mix, and Goldfish(R).
All in all, I think I did fairly well in finding environmentally-friendly school supplies, considering the market. Hopefully, more consumers will start demanding “green” school supplies, and in turn, the manufacturers will start producing them. My fingers are crossed…
Sunday, April 22nd, 2007
So we’re moving this week. So we need boxes. A boatload of boxes.
But we resisted the temptation to buy them from the UPS store this afternoon. Why? Because there are plenty of boxes on this Earth already.
So we used a couple my mom brought us from her hospital. We got creative with some other packing maneuvers, made extra space by consolidating some boxes we already had, and mom’s bringing a heck of a lot more boxes tomorrow.
Why buy new, when we can reuse?
Monday, April 16th, 2007
Actually it was a juice bottle first.
I really needed some healthy yummy juice yesterday, so I bought a bottle (at the local food co-op in Mount Rainier, of course - Glut represent!). This morning I really needed some healthy yummy water, so I poured some from the tap (through a Brita filter of course because this is Washington DC and I have no interest in spending the rest of my week here in the bathroom), and into yesterday’s juice bottle. I carried it around with me all day — to a conference, to the park, even to a coffeeshop — refilling it in water fountains when necessary. What are the advantages of this?
(1) tap water is free. bottled water is not free.
(2) No extra bottle means 1 less plastic bottle produced, 1 less bottle of water shipped across the country, 1 less plastic bottle sitting in a landfill somewhere. If I use this bottle all week, that’s 7 less bottles. If I get a permanent water bottle, like a Nalgene, that means hundreds fewer bottles produced, shipped, and sent to landfills every year — just because of me. That feels good.
(3) I get a hint of flavor in my water.
(4) I get to carry my “Naked” bottle around longer.
Do you know that human beings spend $100 billion dollars on bottled water every year, but for just $15 billion a year everyone on the planet could have safe drinking water and proper sanitation? It’s true. Did you ever stop to think that, at $1.50-$2.50 per liter ($6-10 per gallon), bottled water costs twice what gasoline costs in the United States? Get the whole low-down on the implications of buying bottled water from this excellent OneWorld article from last year.
Image (c) Jeffrey Allen
Monday, February 12th, 2007
Here’s the Thing:
Take 1 less plastic bag next time you leave the supermarket.
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No laptops were harmed
in the posting of this blog. |
The pile of plastic bags under my kitchen sink is getting out of hand. No, it’s been out of hand for a while — in fact about a year ago I started a second pile in a shopping bag under the microwave. I now have a paper bag of plastic bags supplementing a plastic container of plastic bags, each of which had an active useful life span of about six minutes — the time it takes me to walk from the Key Food to my apartment.
I try to reuse the bags as often as possible, but honestly, what am I going to do with six hundred plastic shopping bags, most of which have small holes in them? It’s a war I’m never ever going to win. And I’d bet a lot of us are fighting the same war and we’re all losing.
Imagine the sheer number of bags flowing into and out of New York City every day, most of which will only see a couple blocks worth of daylight in their lifetime. I can’t even begin to guess at the amount of wasted natural and human resources — making the bags, shipping the bags, carting the bags away in the trash. And the amount of bags that sit in landfills around this country? (There are over 3,000 active landfills and 10,000 old municipal landfills across the United States, all of which will eventually leak into ground and surface water, according to zerowasteamerica.org.)
And if your local supermarket checker is anything like mine (and I bet he is), he’s a bit bag happy. Okay, I get that my eggs need to go in a separate bag so they don’t get jostled by the big bad Tropicana man. But do they really need to be double bagged? Does that 8 oz cereal box need two bags? How about the package of sponges and toilet paper? Especially if I’m just walking a few blocks — or even better — out to my car and then in from my car. Seriously, lose the second bag every once in a while. Maybe pile a few more things in the same bag. Or, if you’re really bad ass, get a big stinking canvas bag to carry home all your oversized jars of marmalade.
This is New York. Imagine if each one of the 8 million of us asked for one less bag this week. Every week. That’s nearly half a billion fewer bags to end up in landfills this year. And that’s just New York City and just one less bag per week. It seems to me there’s a lot of potential here.
