Category Archives: Not Green

Into the woods

Saturday morning we hit the highway for some mushroom hunting and a camping trip.  While driving down the interstate (fortunately a short drive), I saw a billboard for a Dodge Ram that said, “It swallowed a luxury car.”  Really?  Actually, it looks like it swallowed five luxury cars, a strip mall, and a football team.  And it has the gas mileage to prove it.

We enjoyed shrooming and camping in unseasonably cool weather.  We looked up at the sky on Saturday night and were wowed by all of the stars.  Breathtaking.  It is amazing what you can see without the light pollution from a city.

Nature is not all fun and games and beautiful sights.  At one point, I glanced down at my [brand new] hiking boot to see what looked like a patch of dirt, except it seemed like a strange place for a patch of dirt, and it was moving.  In addition to regular ticks, I encountered seed ticks for the first time in my life.  Seed ticks are very tiny, and if you have one on you, it probably has lots of friends, just look closer.  Fortunately, my husband was carrying a roll of tape.  I removed the offending boot, and after about 15 minutes of standing on one foot, applying tape to the boot, my leg, and my pants, most of them were gone.  Except for the ones that I continued to find into Sunday.  Ah, nature.

Unless you get really lucky, mushroom hunting requires the hunter to leave the nice, clear hiking paths and venture into the unknown.  The unknown contains scary things, like ticks, and poison ivy.  At several points, I was very sure that we were tromping through large patches of poison ivy, and I pointed it out to the group, only to be told that the plant in question was not poison ivy.  Fifty feet later, I would alert the group again.  My mom would have been proud.  My husband was annoyed.  Somehow, we escaped yet again without poison ivy.

Confused

A week ago, I received emails with the following subject lines from activist organizations regarding the American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454):

“You have a crucial role to play”
“Climate emergency: call the US House today”
“URGENT: Clean energy bill may not pass–send a fax now!”

The main goals of the bill included establishing a carbon cap-and-trade system and setting renewable energy standards.

Some organizations simply urged me to encourage my representative to support the bill.  Others highlighted how the bill had been weakened in House negotiations, saying the original provisions must be restored.  In the end, I sent a message to my representative through 1Sky, asking him to work to strengthen the bill in specific ways and oppose efforts to weaken it.

In the end, the House passed a severely weakened bill.  The bill passed with these major flaws:

1. Instead of auctioning emission permits (i.e. carbon credits), the bill gives away 85% of them.  Giving away carbon credits is the main reason that Europe’s cap-and-trade program failed.  We have a chance to learn from their mistakes, but instead we choose to make the same mistakes over again.

2. The final version of the bill puts forward a much lower renewable energy target than originally proposed, while giving money to coal companies.

3.  The bill strips the EPA of their authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

Despite these weaknesses, many organizations, including Union of Concerned Scientists, Environmental Defense Fund, and 1Sky considered the bill’s passage a victory and a step in the right direction.

So I’m wondering, is it really a victory?  Would we be better off with no bill than one with lots of concessions to coal and oil industries?  Or are the above-mentioned organizations right, that something is better than nothing, that this will be a step forward and not just more of the status quo?

Electronic “stuff”

A few thoughts on this article about recycling electronics:

1. Recycling or no, the amount of waste we produce is appalling.  Reduce, with some reuse, should be our focus.

2. As the article mentions, not everything can be recycled: ” . . . and the plastics, which have no reuse market, are often shipped overseas to developing countries for disposal.”  Lovely, let’s just send all of our crap to developing countries.  Can you say injustice?

3. The fact that we produce this much electronic waste is no accident: ” . . . manufacturers build obsolescence into many of their designs, causing outdated electronics to become the bane of the waste system.”  And the bane of the environment.

4. If you haven’t already seen “The Story of Stuff,” it is very relevant and well worth your time.

Energy Hog

We use relatively little electricity because most of our high energy items (furnace, hot water heater, stove/oven) are gas.  (This is not an intentional decision that we think is somehow better environmentally, it’s just the way our apartment is set up.)  The air conditioning uses by far the most electricity, so our highest kilowatt hour (kWh) months are usually July and August, followed by June and September.  We just received a “Personal Energy Report” from our electric provider, showing monthly usage over the past year, and were shocked to see that our electric usage in December was on par with that in June and more than double that in November. And the higher trend continued in January, February, and March.  We were definitely NOT running A/C in December or any of the months immediately following.

So what happened between November and December?  We purchased a deep freeze.  After a decent bit of research, we decided on a chest freezer (rather than an upright), because even the most energy efficient uprights use more energy than the average chest.  Since buying used is greener (environmentally and on the pocketbook) than buying new, we were happy to find a 2-year-old chest freezer on Craigslist.  So in late November or early December, we wrangled the thing down our basement stairs (a near death experience), plugged it in, and began filling it with food.  It allows us to buy certain goods in bulk, thereby reducing car trips to the grocery store, as well as grow extra food (or buy extra local and in season) and preserve it for winter, thereby extending our local eating.

Now, we suspect that it may be chewing through energy like none other.  There are a few other factors that may have explained some of the energy increase, but none were consistent over the 4 inordinately high months or fit so perfectly with the timing of the initial increase other than the deep freeze.

We plan to further investigate the matter by purchasing a electricity usage monitor that will allow us to test how much electricity any appliance we plug into it is pulling.  I will post the results of our sleuthing as they become available.

Be Prepared

Sometimes being green requires advance planning and an awareness of opportunities to green a “not green” situation.  One such instance occurred over the weekend, and I was uncharacteristically unprepared.

We traveled to Chicago to attend some of the husband’s University of Chicago reunion events.  My standard M.O. when approaching situations where food or beverages may be served on/in disposables is to bring my own non-disposable option.  However, I dropped the ball on that when packing for the weekend, which is how we came to be at the “alumni picnic lunch” on Saturday faced with a sea of soon-to-be trash.  Since serving food directly from the buffet tables into my mouth would, for some reason, not have been acceptable behavior, I acquiesced to social mores and used the disposable plates and utensils.  At least we had our stainless steel water bottle with us and avoided the dreaded plastic cup.

Next up: Saturday night, for the $40 per person alumni dinner (well, young alumni only paid $20 per person, but the point is that a lot of people there paid a good chunk of change for the meal).  The price tag for this event caused me to assume that CERTAINLY they would serve this meal on real dishes to be eaten with real silverware with beverages in real glasses.  I was SO certain, in fact, that I did not even bring the water bottle.  Well, you know what happens when you assume.  We were faced with yet another meal of disposables, including the plastic cups this time.  Besides being bad for the environment, it was just plain tacky to use disposables in this situation.

I am looking forward to the “Please tell us what you thought of alumni weekend” feedback form.  If we do not get one of those, I will hunt down some contact information so I can tell them anyway.

For the sake of fairness, I will add that they were not using just any disposables.  The plates were some form of heavy paperboard that most likely made from recycled materials.  The plastic ware (both cups and utensils) were made from corn and were, theoretically, compostable.  (My spell check does not think compostable is a word, but I beg to differ.)  This is a nice idea, and might appease some environmental objectors, but the problem is that most of these “compostable” disposables end up in landfills right along with the rest of our garbage, in which conditions are not right for composting.

So your best bet is using completely non-disposable alternatives and being prepared.  For lightness and ease of transport, I prefer plastic plates (heavy duty, made for many uses), metal utensils, and a plastic bike water bottle or stainless steel bottle.  I keep a set in my office for work potlucks or other food-at-work opportunities and we have a set for two that we bring to picnics, potlucks, etc.  I met someone who always keeps a set in her car so she will not be caught off guard.  A little preparation and planning can go a long way.