One Little Thing

Sunday, February 10th, 2008

Go Ancient, Drink Tea Instead of Soda

Have you ever thought about how much energy it takes to get things to the store before you buy them? A lot of thought is going into that kind of thing and there is a term for it, embodied energy. Now lets apply that thinking to that morning fix so many of us have every day, our morning coffee, tea or caffeinated soda. Let’s compare drinking a pot  of tea versus 24 ounces of soda every day. 

I weighed a couple items around my house to get a start:

• 10 tea bags weighs 1 oz (30g)
• 15 sweetner packets (Splenda) weighs 3/4 oz (20g)
• 24 oz soda in plastic bottle weighs 1lb 10 1/8 oz (739g)

Using 2 tea bags and 3 bags of sweetener for a pot of tea, which is what we use in my house, and a pot a day for a year we end up with 8 lbs per year.  Figuring that tea travels 1,500 miles  to get to the store via a semi-truck with a 231,800 pound miles per gallon, that works out to 0.052 gallons per pot a day habit per year. Now let’s switch glasses to soda. More…

Friday, April 13th, 2007

I offset my emissions from my flight

Quick one tonight. I’m flying tomorrow (if the snow holds off like I expect it to), so I offset my emissions today — carbon emissions, that is. I’ve written about this before, because I think it’s important so I do it every time I fly. Actually, I should probably set up an account to offset all my day-to-day emissions (although since I don’t own a car or a home or even commute to work, my largest contribution of greenhouse gas might come from my bum — do human gas expulsions contain methane, or just cows’?).

Anyhow, I digress. So I’m offsetting my share of the airplane emissions I’ll be responsible for tomorrow. Read more about how that works here. In the future, when I’m not on such a tight travel deadline, I hope to start taking the train between Denver and NY/DC — it’s about a two-day ride crossing most of middle America and stopping for half a day in Chicago. And it costs about $200 one-way. Not quite as cheap as flying (even when I add in my emissions payment), but not too much more either.

Friday, February 23rd, 2007

Pay to Play

Here’s the Thing:

When you fly, offset your greenhouse gas emissions.

I’ll probably be about 30,000 feet over Memphis when this posts, doing my part to hasten the onset of global climate change, right? Well, only sort of.

You see, I try to fly as rarely as possible, because I know air travel is one of the single most potent contributors to climate change. But when I do have to fly (it’s sort of an emergency this time), I pay a company called Climate Care that invests in projects that clean the environment.

Here’s how it works. They provide a handy calculator to determine how much extra carbon dioxide my trip is spewing into the atmosphere, and translate that into a dollar amount. (Actually, it’s pounds, but who’s counting?) The money supports projects around the world, doing an equal amount of repair to the climate as the damage I’m doing up there in the troposphere. I pay, and travel guilt-free.

The projects Climate Care supports are all over the world, “wherever More…

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007

It’s Valentine’s Day, Spread the Love

Here’s the Thing:

Buy fair trade chocolate & flowers for your sweetie.

Your honey-bunches-of-oats is going to cop a whole lot of gratitude when you pull out those Valentine’s Day proofs of your affection. You will have made his or her day.

Nothing says ‘I love you’ like goofy yellow tulips.

That’s awesome.

But with just a few clicks of your mouse, you can make hundreds of other people’s day at the same time!

You see there’s a lot of bad stuff that goes on in the chocolate and flower businesses around the world. With chocolate, the main issues are child labor and worker exploitation — primarily in West Africa. As for flowers, the issue is weak labor laws in Colombia, which is the main supplier of flowers to the United States. Flower workers there are exposed to dangerous chemicals without any protective gear and they’re forced to work long hours at repetitive tasks that often cause painful carpal tunnel injuries. (Alexandra Early’s excellent article turns over all the dirt on Colombia’s flower industry.)

So what’s the alternative? Buy fair trade chocolate and fair trade flowers. For the flowers, check out Organic Bouquet online — they’re More…