Category Archives: Not Green

Granny behind the wheel

I’m a fairly assertive and aggressive cyclist, but I drive like a ninety year-old woman.  Sure, I generally get up to, and sometimes surpass, posted speed limits, but I go to great lengths to avoid sudden starts and stops.

In practice, this means I accelerate VERY SLOWLY — my goal is to stay ≤ 2000 rpm when accelerating.  I’m always on the lookout for things that will require stopping (car in front of me stopped waiting to make a left turn, red lights, etc.).  When I spot said situations, I start slowing down far in advance, in the hope that by the time I reach the light, it will be green, thus avoiding the gas intensive start from a complete stop.

Turns out that there are lots of impatient people behind the wheel out there who don’t appreciate my laid back, gas conserving, driving style.  I love nothing quite so much as an impatient driver who blows by me in the other lane, clearly annoyed that I am “slowing her down,” and speeds on toward the red light, only to sit and watch as I, at my slow, steady pace, flow right on by when the light turns green because I maintained 15 mph while she had to come to a complete stop.  Ha!

(Okay, I lied about “loving nothing quite so much” in the above paragraph, because I really would love nothing quite so much as biking to work instead of driving.)

Anyway, I’m cruising along on my way home from work yesterday, maintaining a nice, steady pace in the left lane of  a 4-lane, 35 mph street (Kingshighway, for all you StL folks), approaching a red light with cars already stopped in front of me, and the guy behind me pulls out and passes me on the right.  As he passes, he yells, “Lay off the brakes!”  (Followed by some nice, mature name calling, for good measure — this did not further his case with me.)

Which, what? Really?  You’re suggesting that I “lay off the brakes” as I approach these stopped cars in front of me?  Just drive right into them?

Seriously, where do these people come from?!?

Despite the sometimes negative reactions of fellow drivers, I highly recommend a more laid back approach to driving.  Fewer starts and stops, and gentler acceleration, mean less wasted gas.  If you have to drive, you can take steps to make your driving at least a bit greener, not to mention more relaxed.

Message board fail

Everyday on my morning commute (gag), I pass a message board on the interstate that displays the air quality in terms of color.  Green = good.  Yellow = not so good.  Orange = bad.  The sign has yet to display a “Red” air quality day — maybe we would all be dead at that point?

Anyway, if the air quality is yellow or orange, the board displays two follow-up messages: “Please carpool,” and “Please reduce travel.”

Do these messages, delivered at this place and time, have ANY effect whatsoever?  What do they want us to do when we see the, “Please reduce travel,” message?  Pull over on the shoulder and stop right there?  Not go to work for the rest of the week?

Here’s my take: Most people drive right by without noticing (probably because they’re texting or engaging in other dangerous distracted driving behaviors).  Of the small percentage that DO notice the sign, the majority disregard the message.  And then there’s the tiny minority like me, who feel puzzled and/or guilty.  But is there anyone out there who sees the message and actually drives less or sets up a carpool?

I’m making efforts to carpool.  I really, really like my carpool set-up, except by-and-large it’s failing.  It’s been two weeks since the stars aligned our work schedules matched for a carpool day, and before that day, there was another two weeks with no carpooling.

Since I have a reverse commute (most people in the county drive into the city for work — I do the opposite), there is no public transit option.  The 16-mile one way bike ride would involve a lot of big, busy, not bike-friendly roads, not to mention the time involved.  So most days I’m that lone person in a vehicle, passing the air quality message board (which is usually yellow or orange, hardly ever green), contributing to the region’s air quality problems and feeling rather helpless 😦

Whatcha gon’ do with all that junk?

In addition to the requested items (yogurt maker and food dehydrator), my mother arrived in St. Louis two-and-a-half weeks ago with an 18-gallon storage bin.  When I visited my parents in April, I diligently sorted through some stuff in my old bedroom, narrowing it down to this one bin that I was allowed to keep there.  Little did I know that my mom would rescind that offer only a few short months later.

So now I’m stuck with this bin, a bin that contains some items that I want to keep, including a couple of nice photo albums that I made in high school — lots of smiles and cringes looking back through those — and the items pictured above that are on the chopping block.

The high school yearbooks?  They seemed so essential in high school.  Now I’m ambivalent.  Due to some mix of shyness  and wanting my beautiful new yearbook to look beautiful and new, I never collected many signatures/messages in the books, so they’re not overly personal.

I’ve looked back through them a couple of times in the last nine years, but I certainly don’t need them.  Maybe they’ll be fun to share with future generations?  Or maybe they’re just more stuff to occupy space on a shelf or in a bin and add weight on future moves.  I’m guessing that the photo paper they printed the books on is NOT recyclable.

And those athletic honor roll plaques?  Those have got to go.  Sure, they represent some hard work on my part, but even in high school, I didn’t display them on my wall or anything, and I’m not about to start now.

Maybe a trophy shop could remove the engraved metal plate and reuse the wood part?  And the metal plate could be recycled?

The least of the three R’s

Recycling resides at the bottom of the three R hierarchy in terms of environmental benefit.  First comes Reduce, then Reuse, and then, finally Recycle.  Recycling is nice, but it means that some object was produced in the first place, often with the intent to be “disposable.”  When, and if, that item makes its way into a recycling plant (after consuming energy to transport it there), it requires inputs of energy, water, and other products to first break it down and then make it into something new.

So I’m kind of ashamed to show you this:

I’m not sure how we ended up with this many spent non-rechargeable batteries!  We only buy rechargeables, but products that come with batteries have disposables in the package.  It’s not like we use lots of battery powered “stuff,” but we’ve been saving these for awhile.

My church offered a battery recycling collection box — time for these babies to go!  I balked when I read that each battery had to be in its own plastic bag to reduce risk of fire/explosion.  I resisted my temptation to rebel and just throw the whole bag in there.  A bit more research uncovered an alternative to the individual bagging — simply place tape over the positive terminal of each battery — still some waste involved, but much less.  As an added bonus, I avoided having a burnt down church, or some poor postal worker killed by a battery-induced explosion, on my conscience.

In a bit of a recycling blitz, I also pulled out some old tennis shoes for a shoe recycling collection for the Shoeman Water Project.  Reusing or recycling shoes, and using profits to dig wells in developing counties?  Sounds good to me!

I delivered the batteries and shoes by bicycle, of course.  And now back to reducing and reusing 🙂

Car, ugh

The power windows on my bicycle never give me any trouble 😉  The ones on the car are another story.  On Wednesday afternoon, the left front window displayed a new trick it learned — the trick where it does not go up.  Well, eventually it went up; with a lot of coaxing and long rest breaks, it went up a little bit at a time, until, finally, closed!  I immediately pushed the window lock button to prevent an accidental lowering.

Based on my highly technical over-the-phone description, my front and rear (yes, that one is misbehaving, too) left-side window motors need to be replaced, to the tune of perhaps $400.  So that’s how I get to spend what would be a car-free Friday.  Sigh.  This contributes yet more fodder to the “I want to be in a job where I can bike commute again” fire.