Greening my House

When you go to the grocery store, sometimes they still ask you that question. Many are tempted just to say “plastic” because they are convenient, strong, can hold wet things well without breaking, and are really only very small amount of plastic when you think about it.

The problem is that even a very small amount of plastic multiplied by a large number amounts to a huge amount of plastic.

Each year, somewhere on the order 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic grocery bags are consumed every year around the world. Somewhere between 100 and 400 billion of those bags are consumed in the US alone. A vast majority of them go right into a landfill when they are done with their job.

A sizable minority get loose and create non-biodegradable litter which finds its way to rivers and oceans and collecting in huge floating patches in the center of the ocean. The plastic then photodegrades into smaller and smaller pieces until it starts to interfere with the food chain of a wide variety of marine animals, and basically just kills them. The HDPE plastic from which they are made does not biodegrade, so it sticks around in very small bits for thousands of years.

Only a very small fraction of these bags actually get recycled — on the order of 0.5% or so. The problem is that it costs far more to recycle the bags than you can get out of selling the final product (about 60 times or so). It is just not economically feasible to recycle them. That is why you see so few grocery stores advertising that you can recycle the bags with them.

The bags are also a problem on the manufacturing and retail side too. Aggregated, these bags cost grocery stores on the order of $4 billion a year in the US alone. That will eat into profits!

In terms of the plastic used to manufacture the bags, each bag is only a tenth of an ounce or so worth of plastic. But multiplying out, that still accounts for 3 million tonnes of plastic used world wide, not including all the manufacturing waste. This amount of plastic requires a huge amount of oil and natural gas, and a staggering amount of energy to make.

Paper bags are no better. It takes about 4 times the amount of energy to manufacture a paper bag as it does to manufacture a plastic bag. Also, paper manufacturing often releases a lot of toxic chemicals into the environment as well.

I took a look at our own family consumption.

100 to 120 shopping trips a year to the grocery store
4 bags per trip on average
= 400 to 500 plastic bags a year!

What can we do about this problem? There are 2 good solutions:

1. Reusable bags
2. No bags at all

For the past few months we have started using reusable bags. The bags we got at my wife’s work and are made from recycled plastic. Another good choice for durability is canvas, which will last years, and is made from natural materials.

At first, we kept forgetting to bring them with us to the store, but now we store them in the trunk of the car at all times so that if we happen to go to the store, we always have them with us. Now I just have to figure out some way of remembering to get them out of the trunk before I walk in the store.

A reusable canvas shopping bag from www.reusablebags.com, a good source of high quality bags that can be in service for years.

An even better solution is no bags at all. When we go to Costco, they do not offer you bags. You can get old boxes from them, or just stack stuff in the shopping cart. We bring our totes to Costco for the small stuff, but for the mega-packs of things like recycled paper TP, we just keep them free in cart.

No bag at all is also a good option for small purchases at any store. If I go to the store and only get 1 or 2 items, often I just take them as is in my hands. One thing I learned is to keep the receipt out and make sure it is prominently displayed with the items as I walk out of the store so the other employees don’t think I am shoplifting. I have been stopped before by another employee that thought I was just blatantly walking out with stuff.

I also now bring my reusable bags with me if I get take-out food at a restaurant. I ask them to stow the food in my own bag. They are often surprised, but they understand it right away — it is saving them a small amount of money, after all!

So now when we’re asked, “Paper or plastic?” our answer is “Neither!”

Okay, my experiment with the “compost pit” was a failure. Not happy.

Here’s what happened. Basically, the rains came this winter and filled up the pit until I had a soup of rotten food and water that lasted for a number of days after the rains stopped and the water finally seeped out again. This soup stank something awful, as all the aerobic bacteria were killed off and anaerobic digestion began in earnest. I thought the water would just seep into the ground during a rain rather than collecting in the pit. I found out that the ground upon which our house is built has a very high water table since we are close to sea level (~3 or 4 feet ASL), so the water from rain doesn’t have anywhere to go. It just sits there.

So, after having had enough with the olfactory complaints from the wife and indeed from my own nose, I covered over the pit with a number of bags of top soil. This settled, and I added more bags. After a while, this will just be a regular part of the lawn.

The new composting sitting in our side yard.

But what to do with all the food wastes now?

Well, as luck would have it, Costco was selling a 74 gallon tumbling composter for only $99 as a spring special. This is an unbeatable price, as most of the tumbling or spinning composters of that size that I have seen are in the $250 range.  This one is even made from recycled plastics and materials and comes in a box made of recycled materials and no glue. And even better, the family CFO (ie. my wife) approved the purchase, so I got one!

Assembly was pretty easy except for the part where you hang the tumbler from the frame, which was awkward and required 2 people. It took about 45 minutes or so.

I have been putting food wastes in there for about 6 weeks now, and already a lot of it is turning brown. There is no significant smell when the thing is closed, though when open it does smell of good food gone bad. The pile feels nice and warm when you open it up and put your hand near it, so the bacteria and such are doing their jobs.

At some point, I will have to stop adding new food, and let this stuff finish composting. The plan is to temporarily store new waste in a garbage bin, and let the current batch finish without any new additions for a while. Then, put the mostly composted stuff in another garbage bin and let it sit and “finish off” before use in the garden. Then, transfer the new waste to the tumbler and start afresh. Ideally, I should have bought 2 tumblers. Maybe the CFO will let me do that next year if I am good and remember mother’s day.

Close up of the compost so far. Note all the 6 week old brown stuff. Hopefully, all the large pieces will break down into smaller pieces after the compost is done...

As a side note, I must say that I am very impressed with the little changes that Costco is making towards being green. They are now selling organic cotton clothes, organic foods, and puting solar panels on the rooves, and now … composters? Slowly, they are getting there!

With a title like that, maybe you are thinking about European soccer matches? But what I am actually referring to is something equally violent with respect to the environment: the simple bathroom fan. It sucks. Or blows. Your choice. Either way, it’s not good.

What is the problem with bathroom fans?

Well, have you ever wondered where the air that it pumps goes? Usually, it goes directly to your attic, taking with it a valuable resource: its heat. There are many, many ways in which a house is inefficient with heat, causing you to spend a lot more money and produce a larger carbon footprint than you have to in order to get your house to the desired temperature. The bathroom fan is one of them.

In the winter, you spend a bunch of money on natural gas, heating oil, or electricity to heat up the air in your home to a comfortable level. Then, you go to the bathroom, and proceed to pump that nice warm air into the cold attic — ie. outside your insulation (if you have it) and effectively, outside your house!

In the summer, the same thing. You spend a lot of energy on air conditioning, and that nice cool air gets pumped right up into the attic, meaning you have to produce a bunch more air conditioned air to replace it in the rest of the house.

How wasteful is it?

Fans are rated by how much air they can pump in one minute as measured in cubic feet per minute (CFM). Many pump about 70 to 80 CFM, but some are powerful enough to pump 200 CFM.  A typical home contains about 12,000 to 15,000 cubic feet of air. That means that little 100 CFM fan in the bathroom can pump out the entire volume of the house in about 120 to 150 minutes or so. Most of that air is replaced by outside air that needs to be heated up or cooled down as appropriate.

Now, we have all forgotten to turn off a bathroom fan for a few hours, right? We come back from that shopping trip 3 hours later and realize we left the bathroom fan on. Oh well, it can’t be that bad, we think. Well, the entire volume of the house has been replaced, and that means we have spent a deal deal of energy just heating the new air for nothing!

So what to do about these fans?

Well, what I have started doing is using the fan for one purpose and one purpose only — to evacuate the bathroom of uh… “undesirable odours” shall we say. When the undesirable air is gone, I turn the fan off immediately. In the spring or fall, if the outside air is a mild temperature, I just open the window and leave the fan off for this purpose too.

I do not turn on the fan for showers or baths or any other reason.

This has a number of advantages:

1. The heat contained in the air from the shower water will migrate into the house instead of being pumped outside.
2. In the winter or summer, the humidity generated by a shower will help to rehumidify the house air. Both furnaces and air conditioners tend to dry the air out (which is why some people get bloody noses in the winter or summer). You just have to make sure to leave the bathroom door open when you are done so that it dries out, otherwise you can start growing mold and mildew. Our bathroom usually dries out in about 20 minutes with just the door open. Humid air also retains heat better than dry air, so it will help [very slightly] reduce your cooling or heating costs as well.
3. The moisture in the air that is pumped up to the attic with the bathroom fan will condense when it hits the cooler air in the attic. Cold and damp is perfect conditions for growing fungus, mold, and mildew. If the mold gets completely out of control in your attic, it can create very serious health problems due to the toxins they can contain.
4. I can’t forget to turn off the fan, because it is already off.
5. A regular bathroom fan uses 40 to 75 watts or so.  That is equivalent to a small incandescent light bulb. By not turning on the fan, I am not using electricity to run it. Assuming I take one shower a day and the fan is running for 20 minutes (15 min shower + 5 minutes to dry out the bathroom afterwards), that comes to 5.9 kWh per year saved, which costs me about 77c around here. Not a big deal, but all these sort of little things can add up over time.
6. Our orchids LOVE the warmth and humidity in the bathroom. Now they are actually starting to bloom.
7. In the winter, the bathroom stays warm when you are done showering, until you open the bathroom door to let it air out. This means you are not freezing before you get the chance to dry off. With the bathroom fan on, the warm, moist bathroom air is replaced by the cooler air from the rest of your house, making it unpleasant to step out of the shower.
8. Best of all, this is something green I can do that costs nothing!

On Ungolden Pond

Well, I have finally gotten rid of the mosquito-larva-laden pond in our front yard. It had a pump in it that got clogged up every two weeks, which meant it was continually clogged because I was too lazy to clean it that often. So, it got algae and scum and was not very pleasant. Though I was probably providing habitat for many creatures, I think it was not so healthy for the human creatures that lived nearby. (ie. us!)

So I pumped out all the water onto the front lawn — why let it go down the drain? Might as well water the lawn — and ripped out the plastic pond liner that the previous owners had put in there. Rather than throw it out into the landfill, I put it up for grabs on Freecycle, and it was snapped up in no time by a grateful single mom whose son always wanted a little gurgling pond in their yard. (The son better stretch well before he starts digging, because that’s a big pond and will take a lot of digging!)

Here is a view of the old pond liner that I gave away on Freecycle.

The Compost Pit

But now I am left with a hole in the exact shape of the liner above. How to fill this hole. I need dirt. Cheap Dirt. Hmm… where can I get some dirt?

Wait! I know! Now I can kill two birds with one stone. This hole in the ground will become my new compost pit. Once the items have decomposed into compost, the compost can just stay where it is and be the dirt that fills the hole and becomes part of the lawn.

Only problem is, I have never composted before. So, I did some research.

What I found is an awesome free book on Project Gutenberg by Steve Solomon called “Organic Gardener’s Composting“. It is very detailed and illuminating.

However, it is also long, so I’ll try to summarize it here. If you are going to compost yourself, I would definitely recommend reading the whole book for a full explanation of the “why” behind everything. Otherwise, if  you are merely curious about the really bare basics, just read on.

Carbon and Nitrogen

Carbon and nitrogen are two elements that form the basis for many compounds used by plants.

Carbon is used to create carbohydrates, which are sugars, starches, cellulose and lignin which form the energy storage mechanism and the structure of many plants. They are also transformed into fats and oils from there. Carbohydrates are made by plants via photosynthesis from carbon dioxide in the air, water, and light energy from the sun. Plants can make these very easily. They can also get some of their carbon from the ground.

Nitrogen is used by plants to create proteins from amino acids that are composed partly of that nitrogen. However, nitrogen cannot be “fixed” from the its gaseous form in the air (N₂) into a solid form usable by plants as easily as carbon can. Instead, plants have to get their nitrogen from somewhere else. Some plants get their nitrogen from various single-celled organisms that fix nitrogen into a form that plants can use. Some plants, like beans, even create an environment for these organisms to grow around their roots. Other plants need to absorb their nitrogen from their surroundings in the form of composted materials that happen to be near their roots.

The Carbon/Nitrogen Ratio

The most important thing to think about in compost is the carbon/nitrogen ratio of the stuff you are putting in your compost heap. You want to achieve the ideal of 25 units of carbon to 1 unit of nitrogen. If you do, the compost will degrade nicely and form healthy, high-quality fertilizer for plants with enough carbon and nitrogen for the plants to thrive. The final, stable compost will have a ratio of about 12.5 to 1 because some of the carbon is “burned” off by the composting organisms to get their energy.

Most things have both carbon and nitrogen, but some are very lopsided in one way or another. For example, sawdust and wood are almost all carbon with a ratio of between 100 and 400 to 1. Urine is almost all the way on the other side of the scale with a ratio of 3 or 5 to 1. To balance it out, you need to mix a little of both to achieve the 25 to 1 ideal.

Finding the carbon/nitrogen ratio of any particular piece of material is impossible without taking it to a lab for analysis. Even within a particular type of material, it depends on how that material was grown and what happened to it afterwards. For example, grass clippings from your lawn may have anywhere between 15 and 40 to 1 depending on the time of year and how much and which fertilizers you put on it.

Because of that, it is easier for the home composter to lump types of material into 5 general classes with average ratios that represent everything in the class:

• High Carbon Materials – these materials have a ratio of 100 to 1 or more. Certain things like hardwoods can even be as high as 400 to 1.
• Medium Carbon Materials – these materials are in the range of about 50 to 1
• Balanced Materials – these materials are in the range of about 25 to 1, and are in the right range already.
• Medium Nitrogen Materials – these materials are in the range of about 12 to 1
• High Nitrogen Materials – these materials have a ratio of 6 to 1 or less

Here is a short list of materials and the classes they are in. This is not an exhaustive list! I will be making a separate page with a large list of materials as I find them.

The trick then is to mix these things in the right way to generally achieve about 25 to 1.

If you do not mix them in the right way, you will still get compost that looks and smells the same as regular compost, but it will not have the right mix of nutrients or nitrogen for the plants. I found out that the municipal solid waste compost I was advocating in an earlier post comes mostly from balanced to high carbon sources, which are basically all the garden wastes from everyone’s yards. These are green and dried grass clippings, dried plants, fallen dried leaves, branches and wood clippings. Basically, it is everything you throw into the green bin when taking care of your yard and garden. All of those things are heavier on the carbon side than on the nitrogen side. This means that the compost is actually lower quality than it could be, and does not provide enough nitrogen to the plants to be a good fertilizer.

To achieve the right ratios, you should put the materials together with the following ratios:

For every unit of high or medium carbon material you put into the compost, put in 24 times as much medium nitrogen or 8 times as much high nitrogen materials to balance it out.

Alternately, you could say:

For every unit of medium nitrogen material you put in, put 4% of a unit worth of high or medium carbon material to balance it out.
For every unit of high nitrogen material you put in, put in 12% of a unit worth of high or medium carbon material to balance it out.

In terms of the balanced materials, you can put in as much as you want, as long as all the other carbon materials are balanced by the nitrogen materials.

When I say “unit” in the above sentences, I mean any type of weight unit like pounds or kilograms. The unit doesn’t matter as much as the ratio between them and that you use the same unit of measurement for everything.

Other Concerns

Acidity

The acidity level for compost should be right about neutral. (ie. pH of 7). Many foods, especially fruits, are very high in acid (pH < 7), and create an unbalanced mix. Check out the list of the acidity of various foods on the FDA web site. To combat too much acidity, you can add in alkaline foods such as lima beans, egg shells, frozen cooked corn, or even a little baking soda (not baking powder). Be careful how much!

Nutrients

You may have seen the NPK measures on regular inorganic fertilizer at the store. These are the measure of Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium (symbol K) in the fertilizer.  These “macronutrients” are most needed for plant development, but so are a wide variety of “micronutrients” that occur in far smaller concentrations. Inorganic fertilizers have many problems that I won’t go into, but one in particular is the focus on the macronutrients. Eventually, if you only replace the macronutrients in the soil year after year, all the micronutrients will get used up by those years worth of crops, and you will eventually get a very unhealthy soil.

Compost can have all the nutrients, macro and micro. The easiest way to achieve this is to just put in a variety of foods into your compost. Mostly, it will come out right by itself. (This is also healthy for you because it means you are eating a variety of foods at home!) However, if you have a large amount of one particular food in the compost, then you will usually run into problems of too much of some nutrients and not enough of others. Variety is the spice of compost, as well as life!

Water

The bacteria in compost need water to thrive. The compost should be somewhat wet like a damp cloth. Add in a little bit of water each time you throw in some more food, and perhaps on hot, dry summer days as well.

Air

There are two types of composting: aerobic, and anaerobic. Both will produce a similar compost using the same feedstocks, but the aerobic compost will smell a heck of a lot better as it is composting. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t an extremely pleasant smell until it gets near the end, but it is a lot better than the anaerobic composting. Also, aerobic composting is usually faster.

So, you need to turn the compost every few days to introduce new air and new oxygen. Various manufacturers sell “tumbling” composters that can be spun on a hinge or axis. They are expensive (like $250), but work very nicely and easily if you can afford them. I’m planning in the future to make one for myself out of recycled/reused materials. But, that’s for a future posting!

Bad Stuff

There are some things you should not put into the compost at home:

• Meat and fish scraps, including foods made with meat like spaghetti sauce. These make for great nitrogen materials because they contain lots of proteins. However, there are a number of problems with them. First, when they break down (ie. putrify), they smell EXTREMELY bad due to the creation of putrescine and cadaverine. Anyone who has ever smelled a decaying dead body before knows what I mean. Second, they will also attract pests such as rats and raccoons that will dig through your compost and make a complete mess in your yard. Third, the putrefying meat can be a harbour for bacteria and diseases, so you cannot put the resulting compost on any edible plants in your garden. If you have a completely secure and closed off vessel to compost the meats (concrete?), or if you live on a farm, and you are only using the compost on ornamental plants, then you can compost the meat. Otherwise, if you are composting at home, trust me. Just avoid the meat.
• Oils. Oils go rancid and smell. The smell is not as bad as the meat, but it can get bad. More importantly, oils break down very slowly and the rest of your compost will be done before the oils in it are.
• Human feces. Just don’t do it. For one thing, it stinks. This is not even good on your ornamentals because of the human diseases it can harbour such as E. Coli. If you want to compost your own wastes, there are composting toilets for that purpose which guarantee that the composting happens hot enough to kill all these diseases.
• Diseased plants. Some diseases can survive the composting process and infect your other plants when you use it as fertilizer.
• Weeds with seeds in it. This is because the seeds will survive if the compost doesn’t get hot enough, and you will be sowing a new batch of weeds in your garden when you’re done.
• The roots of underground creeper plants, unless they are thoroughly pureed somehow. These resist composting and will grow new plants. Example: bamboo. That is nasty stuff that is very difficult to kill.
• Anything that is not organic or was not alive at one time. This includes all glass, plastics and metals, except for plastics made from starches which are designed to be biodegradable.
• Solid wood, twigs, sticks, and bark. These are actually okay in the compost, but they break down by fungii so slowly that they don’t really add much to your compost. The rest of the compost will be done long before the wood is.
• Glossy magazines. The paper has too many contaminents in it. Regular paper, especially newsprint, is fine because it is usually printed with soy inks that are biodegradable, but avoid those perfume-laden glossies.
• Glossy paper plates. These are usually made with a thin layer of plastic to protect the paper from getting waterlogged and falling apart, and the plastic of course never breaks down. If you want to compost your paper plates, there are a variety of brands that advertise that they are compostable and they are made only of paper and no plastic.

How It’s Gone So Far

Well, since writing the earlier parts of this article, it has rained very heavily where we live. Unfortunately, that meant the ground got water logged, and the pit became a pool again which only drained slowly as the ground dried out again. This meant all the food was buried under a foot of water or so, which means anaerobic composting started up. YUCK-O. It smells really bad now. I have stopped adding food to the pit and covered it with leaves and dried grass from the yard. This successfully insulated us from the smell. I thought the rainwater would just absorb into the ground. I didn’t realize it would just stay there if it rained enough.

So, I have co-opted an old plastic garbage can I had lying around. Now all the food goes there. There are air holes poked in the top, and I can roll the can around on the ground to mix everything and introduce air. This has gone very well, and is a heck of a lot cheaper than one of those tumbling composters.

The smell is very light. Standing right beside the can, I can’t smell anything odd most of the time. I have to open the lid before I get the bad food smell. It looks right too. Much of the older food is turning brown and black, though it may be due to the coffee grounds. There are lots of fruit flies and other insects in there, which is good, as they are part of the process of breaking down foods.

The plan is to compost all the food, then fill the pit the rest of the way with a mix of compost and dirt. Surprisingly, after only 5 weeks of adding food to the can, it is now 1/3 full. We eat a lot at home, it seems. I think I may need more cans in the future for making compost for my garden! I also have to remember next fall to store some dried leaves and plants to use as the “carbon” for next year’s compost.

And the Wrap Artist of the Year goes to…

Let’s say I do have a gift that needs wrapping, so I need wrapping paper, right?

Well, hold on a second.

A lot of wrapping paper is printed on glossy paper that has been bleached first. The chlorine in the bleach is really bad for the environment. (See the post below about laundry for more on how chlorine is bad when it gets into the fresh water system.) The stuff that makes it glossy is often resins or even worse PVC, which is a type of plastic. That makes it difficult to recycle. The ink itself may be made from petroleum, which of course causes more CO2 emissions and therefore global warming. Finally, the paper itself could have been made from old growth forests and therefore unsustainable. All this for a product that is decoration that is ripped off and just thrown away.

In the US, roughly 4 million tons of wrapping paper and shopping bags are thrown out every holiday season instead of being recycled or reused.

Woah.

Green Wrapping

There is a better way.

• You can use unbleached paper to avoid the chlorine problems.
• You can use flat paper instead of glossy to avoid the coatings.
• You can find paper printed with soy-based inks that are compostable and recyclable.
• Some paper is even made from sustainably farmed wood.

Presents wrapped "greenly".

Of course, these are hard to find at just any store, but there are some that do actually “get it”. There are of course, the eco-stores online such as SweetOrganicsAndNaturals.com, EarthLoven.com, FishLipsPaperDesigns.com, or SuperiorGiftWrap.com, amongst many others, that sell recycled and eco-friendly paper.

The big stores are starting to “get it” too. Hallmark for example prints most of its gift wrap on paper stock from sustainable forests, and their Product(RED) papers are made with all recycled fibers.

Just do a search on Yahoo or Google for eco-friendly wrapping paper. The whole goal here if you are going to wrap something is to use a paper that can be easily composted or recycled.

The Un-Wrap

An even better solution to buying new paper is to wrap with something you might already have around your home.

• Grocery store bags are made of unbleached paper and make good wrapping. Just turn them inside-out to get the plain brown wrapping on the outside of the present. If you have kids, they can liven up the paper by drawing a Christmas scene on it, which makes it a lot more personal and very cute.
• The comics section of the newspaper is fun for kids, and 95% of newspapers today are printed with soy-based inks and have at least some recycled paper content, so the paper is compostable.
• Old magazines are pretty colourful, and some of the women’s magazines even smell sorta nice.
• Old fabric such as tee-shirts that you were going to throw away anyways makes for a luxurious and unique wrapping.
• In Japan and Korea, it is very common to wrap presents with special fabrics that can be saved and reused. In Japan: furoshiki, in Korea: Bojagi. Just don’t give the same cloth back to the person who originally gave it to you!
• Reuse a box that you got from someone else or from a shipment.
• Keep those little bags that you get from other people for presents, like the ones that wine bottles come in, or the wide gift bags for presents. Often, you can regift them to someone else many times before they are so worn out that they need to be recycled.
• Used paper from your printer. Misprints and other such wastes can be put to good use covering small boxes. But, be careful — make sure you don’t do what I did and use your phone bill that your wife left on the printer. Protect your identity.
• Cellophane. I’m talking about the real thing, not regular plastic wrap that people call cellophane. Real cellophane is made from the cellulose of plants and is fully biodegradable, though some of the chemical used in its manufacture are a little nasty. Sometimes, it even comes in nice tints, and makes great festive-looking wrapping for food gifts.
• Some very careful and meticulous people (ie. not me) unwrap presents preserving the paper intact. They can then reuse the paper for their own gifts. This takes a lot of work, but can save the eco-unfriendly paper from an untimely demise. Obviously this idea is not going to work so well if the recipient is a kid.
• The paperwork from your mortgage, or the paper from your stock certificates makes for a nice colourful wrapping. They’re worthless in this economy anyways. Haha, okay, just kidding. (Mostly — grrrr!!)

Even better is to not wrap the present at all. My wife and I don’t wrap our presents to each other at all. We just bring them out and give them. Mostly that is because we are too lazy to wrap, but we can justify it to ourselves as “being green.” Maybe that will change when our newborn twins get a little older and want presents under the tree.

Decorations

Bows and cards can be made from paper or natural material ribbons. Tying a bow is actually pretty easy, even for a non-artistic engineer like me. Just keep it simple and use a shoelace knot. Avoid the plastic ribbon you find at the craft stores. Plastic = oil = green house gasses = global warming.

Get out the crayons and let the kids doodle on plain paper before you wrap presents. This will make for a great personalized wrapping, especially for favourite uncles or aunts.

Keeping it Together

As for holding the package together, there are a few choices:

• Most clear tapes today use regular plastic, but if you can find real cellophane tape, you can use that, especially if it has natural glue.
• You can find paper-based packing tape that goes well with your reused grocery bag wrapping because they’re both brown. Although, you should try to avoid the paper tape with fibreglass reinforcement in it that you get at moving stores. They are strong for moving boxes, but not compostable.
• Another type of paper tape is joint tape used to tape up the seams between two pieces of drywall. You can find that at any home or hardware store.
• Paper ribbons make a pretty wrapping around boxes which don’t need structural support.
• Tie it up with natural manila, sisal, cotton, or wool string. Any of these natural fibres should be able to biodegrade over time in a compost heap. Avoid plastic twine.

Delicates

When you need to protect delicate presents, avoid the styrofoam or plastic packing peanuts. You know, global warming again.

Use regular paper, tissue, old magazines, newspapers, or your printer misprints all scrunched up as packing materials.

There are a few companies that sell packing peanuts made of corn starch that can also biodegrade in a compost heap easily. They even dissolve quickly in water, so if you don’t have a compost heap, you can just flush them down your drain or toilet. Or, if you are making a nice sauce, you can drop a few of them in there to thicken it. Okay, just kidding. I wouldn’t put them in the food after an unknown number of people handled them. Ew.

Shipping

For those friends and family members that do not live close to you and whom you are not going to visit, obviously you need to ship them their presents. Try to buy their presents and ship by ground freight instead of air. Shipping by ground uses far less fuel than shipping by air, and therefore less carbon emissions. They key here is to shop early enough to allow time for the ground freight to get there before the holidays.

Another idea is to shop locally over the Internet. That way, shipping is minimized because the gifts are shipped from a location from near the recipient.

Happy Holidays!

Water, Water, Everywhere, and Nary a Drop to Drink

In California, we are still in a drought. Fresh water is a precious commodity. Because it is hard to get, it is not a good idea to waste any of it that we do have.

In addition to the scarcity problem, generating the electricity used to pump that water all over our state causes carbon emissions. The water on the San Francisco peninsula where we live comes from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, which is a good 140 miles east, and must be pumped through this huge conduit (the Hetch Hetchy aquaduct) down to the local Crystal Springs reservoir. It takes quite a bit of energy to pump water that far. From there, it is pumped to the various communities on the peninsula, requiring even more energy and carbon emissions.

Incidentally, these local reservoirs are built literally right over the San Andreas fault… I’m not sure what would happen if the fault moved right under those reservoirs, but it just doesn’t sound like a good idea to me to build them there. But that’s beside the point.

Where the Sun Don’t Shine

Now, I already talked about taking Navy showers in a previous posting. Now, I’m going to talk about toilets.

A dual-flush toilet in France.

In the US, your toilet consumes either 1.6 gallons (6 liters) or 3.5 gallons (13 liters) per flush, depending on if it is a new one or and old one. Usually, the average person flushes their toilet about 6 to 8 times a day. Calculating that out over a whole year, for a family of 4, that means your family is flushing 18,688 gallons if you have a 1.6 gallon toilet, or 40,880 gallons if you have a 3.5 gallon toilet. (And probably more if one or more of the kids are teenagers!)

Even though water seems cheap, when you are flushing that volume of water down the toilet, the costs can add up. Where I live, a “unit” of water = 100 cubic feet = 748 gallons = $4.08. That means the flushes for 4 people for a year cost $101.93 with the 1.6 gallon toilet or $222.98 for the 3.5 gallon toilet.

Wow, that’s a lot of money being flushed down the toilet!

Now, if you think about all your bathroom trips, how many times do you urinate, and how many times do you defecate. Most of the time, you only urinate. Maybe once or twice a day, you defecate. Toilets were designed to whisk away feces easily, but the majority of the time you don’t need that volume of water. You just need to replace the water in the bowl.

In Australia, where they have had water shortages for many years, they came up with the idea of dual-flush toilets. The toilets have a #1 and #2 flush buttons on the top, and you select the appropriate one. The flush uses only as much water as needed according to the type of waste in the bowl. Now many other countries have adopted these toilets too, as many travelers can attest, in order to save water. Above is a picture of a dual-flush toilet in France. The large round circles on the wall are the flush buttons.

There are retro-fit solutions for North American toilets too, such as Select a Flush. This is a $25 replacement for the valve in your existing toilet. The new insert actually has 2 valves in it, and when you push the flush handle in one direction, it does a full flush, and when you push it in the other direction, it does a half flush. This accomplishes the same thing as the Australian toilets, but is much cheaper than getting a whole new toilet.

Now, here’s an even cheaper and easier solution: stick a brick in it.

Yes, I mean I have taken a regular red masonry brick, and put it into our toilet fill tank. The brick displaces water in the tank, and later the flushes are somewhat less than before. I have not noticed any difference in flushing power, and neither has my wife. In fact, I didn’t tell her just to see if she would notice — she didn’t. I figure if we ever reach a situation where there are some stubborn solids that need more flushing power, I can just take the brick out temporarily and reflush. So far, that has not been necessary.

The brick has these dimensions:

    10.2 cm x 6.4 cm x 21 cm = 1371 cc's = 1371 ml = 1.37 liters

That is, the brick displaces 1.37 liters of water. That means our flushes are 4.63 liters instead of the standard 6, which is a reduction of 23%.

Calculating out:

    2 adults x 8 flushes a day x 365 days a year = 5840 flushes a year

    5840 flushes * 1.6 gallons per flush = 9344 gallons of flush water

    9344 gallons / 748 gallons per unit * $4.08 per unit = $50.97 a year to flush our toilet

    Reducing that cost by 23% because of the brick means we save $11.72 a year.

    Cost of the brick: $0.50.

That means the brick paid for itself in about 15 days!

    Total water saved: 9344 gallons * 23% = 2149 gallons

That’s a pretty good deal, eh?

Now if you have an old 3.5 gallon commode, you could put in 2 or 3 bricks. That will save you a bunch of money, and in a small way, will also help save the environment.

It’s that time of year again when people decorate stuff, things are baked, and presents are bought and given. It’s Christmas time again. (And Hanukkah and Kwanzaa too)

This year, we are going to attempt to be a little more environmentally friendly with Christmas than we were in previous years. There will be a few posts on this subject, and this is just the first of them.

Gifts

Everyone has received one of “those” gifts. The one that makes you think, “What the heck were they thinking?” Nice sentiment and all, but …

Well, those sort of gifts are a triple whammy.

1. Not only are they just plain bad and make you feel guilty for not liking the gift that your friend took the trouble to give you, you have to make a little white lie and say you like it.
2. This type of gift makes it clear that your friend or family member obviously doesn’t know you well enough.
3. The gift is often just thrown out, perfectly new and unused, because there is no gift receipt with it and you don’t know what else to do with it. What a waste!

Well, why not save it from damnation to the landfill, and regift it? Yes, that’s right. Regifting is not only something that Seinfeld characters do, but you can too! Maybe someone else wants your new what-ya-ma-call-it? I mean, someone must like them or else they wouldn’t make them. (Exception: fruit cakes. No-one likes them. Not sure why they are even manufactured.)

There is an organization called Freecycle whose purpose is to make it easy to give away things you don’t want rather than throwing them into the landfill. One man’s junk is another man’s treasure, right? Just sign up with your local chapter, and once you are approved, you can browse the web site of local individuals giving away free stuff. You can also list your own stuff you’d like to get rid of. Of course, it doesn’t have to be just stuff you got for Christmas that you don’t want and can’t return, but anything that is servicable that you don’t want any more at any time of the year.

Better yet, check out the list of free stuff in your area to see if you can get free gifts for someone on your list. Can’t beat the price, and you are helping to keep stuff out of the landfill.

We just signed up for this service, and will be on the look out for appropriate gifts for friends and family members.

Other Gifts

If you do want to get a gift for someone, and can’t find anything on freecycle, there are still things we can do to be more green.

One of the best gifts I’ve gotten recently is a jar of cherry jam. It doesn’t sound like much, but it was jam that my friend made herself out of organic cherries that came from her boyfriend’s tree in his own backyard. It was packaged in a cute little jar (a reused jar no less) with a little rattan ribbon and a card. It was very personal as I love cherries, local because it was grown less than 25 miles from where I live, organic, and appropriate since she put in the effort to make it, package it, and give it to me. That was worth more to me than the bought gifts. Plus, on top of all of that, it tasted really good too. Cherry jam with a little vanilla ice cream. Hmm hmm!

Here are some ideas for green gifts. The whole strategy is to avoid buying something new and especially to avoid getting something that is made with non-sustainable materials such as plastic. Even better, get something that is not even physical.

• In general, edibles are a good gift. They don’t create garbage for the landfill, and the packaging can often be reused or at least recycled. Plus, the effort you put into making or cooking them will be appreciated, especially if you are a good cook or a good baker. Who can resist some chocolatey goodness?
• Plants. This is a gift that should last for years. However, if your friend or relative is lame and kills the plant through neglect, at least the gift itself is not contributing to global warming and can be put in the green bin when it’s dead. If you’re concerned about the colour of your friend’s thumb (ie. it’s not green enough), then get them a cactus. It should be able to withstand infrequent waterings. I only know a few people who have killed cactii.
• Photos. A nicely wooden-framed picture of you and your friend makes a great gift and one that they will cherish for a while. Plus, they will think of you every time they see it!
• Tickets for public transit. Encourage someone to ride the transit instead of driving by buying them some tickets which they will feel obligated to try out. If they actually do try it and like it, you will have made a lasting decrease in greenhouse gas emissions.
• Rescue a cat or dog from the shelter. Not only will this make your kids very, very happy, it will probably make the animal pretty happy too. Plus, it takes no non-renewable materials to build the animal.
• CFLs or LED lights. Encourage other people to go green just like you have.
• Digital music, movies, games, ebooks, or software, especially if they are downloaded. This takes no physical resources to make, and most teenagers will be very happy with it. Heck, I’m happy with it, and I’m well past the teenage years!
• A gift netflix subscription.
• A 1 hour massage at your local day spa.

In general, we will be trying to give edibles (or drinkables!) this Christmas, especially ones we made ourselves, and maybe even some other home-made gifts.

Every year, I make about 50 gallons of wine in my garage (viva la California!), and this year the wine turned out quite nice. So everyone will be getting a bottle of Domaine Braunille. (My friends think I look like the old Brawny man, hence the name.) I usually ask for the bottles back when they are done with the contents. I can give them the promise to fill it with more wine and give it back to them next year. That way, the bottle doesn’t go to the landfill, and doesn’t even need to be recycled. It is just cleaned and reused. Another advantage is that all my bottles are the same type from the original batch I bought 2 years ago. Plus, I don’t have to buy new bottles to put the next year’s vintage in.

There hasn’t been a posting on this blog for a few months now. The reason is twofold. And the two are named Kai and Ella, who were born November 11, at 5:39pm and 5:41pm respectively! Yes, that’s right, we are proud new parents of twins!

Our newest family members Ella and Kai

That leads us to a whole new thing to worry about in terms of the environment. (Amongst all the other things we worry about with them directly.) How do we have babies and not ruin the environment at the same time?

There will be a number of posts on this topic in the coming months, but for now one of the biggest problems is diapers.

It is estimated that 27.4 billion disposable diapers are used each year in the US, which is about 3.4 million tons of waste material that ends up in landfills. Regular disposable diapers can take upwards of 500 years to decompose in the landfill. Disposable diapers can use 3.5 times as much energy, 8 times as much non-regenerable raw materials, and 90 times as much renewable material as cloth diapers to manufacture. Even worse, the plastic in disposables is made from oil, which of course causes more CO2 emissions during its manufacture.

Also, disposable diapers create many potential health problems:

• The incidence of diaper rash in 1955 when almost all babies used cloth diapers was 7%. The incidence in 1991 when 90% of babies used disposables was 78%.
• There are many toxic chemicals used in diapers to absorb urine and feces, and to absorb odors. Some of these chemicals have been linked to increased rates of asthma in babies.
• The paper parts of the disposable diapers are almost always bleached. From previous posts, you know that bleach (ie. clorine) is pretty bad for the environment in the first place. But it gets even worse — when you put bleached paper near the skin of a newborn, dioxins may leach out, which are nasty chemicals that can cause cancer, liver damage, and skin diseases.
• Disposables significantly increase the temperature of the scrotum for male babies, resulting in increased rates of male infertility in later years because of lowered sperm counts.

There are other ways.

Cloth diapers are reusable, and no extra CO2 is emitted to grow the cotton. Also, if cotton finds its way into the landfill, it decomposes much faster than the plastic in disposable diapers. (On the order of a few years.) There is evidence that babies in cloth diapers do potty train faster possibly because they dislike the less dry feeling of cloth diapers.

Cloth does have some disadvantages. It takes a good amount of energy and clean water to clean the diapers. Diapers have to be cleaned in very hot water in order to sterilize them. Also, there are problems with leakage because cotton is not stretchy like disposable diapers and it is difficult to form a good seal. I have another friend, however, that claims that people with leakage are just not doing it right, and that you basically have to learn how to fold and apply the diapers properly in order to minimize the leakage.

Another option is non-toxic and non-bleached disposables such as those made by Seventh Generation. These are much healthier for the baby and for the environment. However, they do still use plastic and therefore eventually cause global warming. Also, they also go into the landfills, which is not sustainable.

A third option is diapers made from completely compostable materials such as the gdiaper. Gdiapers are disposable diapers that are also non-toxic and non-bleached, but they are completely compostable in 150 days. Also, they are flushable in regular North American toilets. Gdiaper recommends only composting the wet diapers, and flushing the soiled diapers in order to avoid problems with nasty bacteria in the compost. (See the earlier post on kitty litter.) In this way, gdiapers have the advantages of disposables but are pretty sustainable as well. I have also heard complaints about leakage with the gdiapers as well, however.

We are currently trying the Seventh Generation diapers, and will try the gdiaper soon. The idea is that we will sign up for a cloth diaper service for regular at-home changes, and then use the “green” disposables for travel and to visit grandma who just adores her newest little grandkids. Later, I will let you know how they work.

Last week it was my wife’s birthday. I think she will kill me if I reveal on this site how old she actually is, but let’s just say she turned 29.

Again.

In any case, I got her a present. A green present. Literally! It was a green-coloured bath robe, and she has been wanting a nice new robe for quite a while now. The old one was 15 years old, falling apart, and let’s just say I got the new one for her partly to save my nose from more, uh… “olfactory abuse”.

Now for the new robe, I made sure the robe was both green and “green”. That is, not only green-coloured, but also it was manufactured from organic cotton and bamboo fibres.

Why Organic Cotton?

It turns out that cotton is a finiky crop to grow. There are numerous pests that can infest it, such as boll weevils, tobacco budworm, cotton bollworm, and pink bollworm, just to name a few. Often, the cotton plants are genetically modified with bacteria genes in order to resist these pests.

The cotton growing industry relies very heavily on chemical fertilizers and insecticides, which are of course toxic to many organisms, including humans. Cotton production uses more chemicals per unit area than any other crop and accounts in total for 16% of the world’s pesticides. The worst of the chemicals includes Aldicarb, which is an acutely toxic pesticide classified by the World Health Organisation as “WHO1a”, or “extremely hazardous.” One drop of this stuff is sufficient to kill an adult.

Even worse, much of the cotton we wear is grown in third world countries in Africa such as Mali, Ghana, or Benin that have moved away from their more traditional farming methods and have now become dependent on the chemicals from the West to grow cotton to sell to the West. Regulations in such countries are pretty lax, so the use of Aldicarb and Endosulfan (a neurotoxin) and other toxic chemicals is rampant, and the safety precautions are almost non-existent. Every year, roughly 1 million workers are hospitalized world-wide from poisoning by chemicals used in the cotton growing.

And even worse than that, these chemicals make their way from the leaves and bolls of the cotton plant into the environment, toxifying rivers and streams, and also the oceans. Many of the chemicals are found in random samples of water taken world-wide, including in the US.

But, there is a better way. Cotton can be grown organically and without genetic modification. With know-how and hard work, it can be grown without the chemicals, and it turns out just as strong and soft as conventionally grown cotton.

Why Bamboo Fibres?

Bamboo is one of the fastest growing grasses in the world. Yes, that’s right, grass. It’s a huge variety of grass! Sure, it’s a pretty sturdy type of grass, but a grass nonetheless. Some varieties of bamboo can grow 3 to 4 feet in a single day, and can reach maturity in as little as 2 months, making it a very easily renewable material. Bamboo plants can be grown sustainably with few pesticides, and because you do not kill the plant when you harvest a shoot,  you can produce multiple crops a year, year after year.

Bamboo has some amazing properties. Some varieties are harder than oak, making it a great building material qualifying for LEED credits. Other varieties are terrifically strong, both in tensile strength and compression strength. Some varieties of bamboo can withstand a tensile force of 3200 kg/cm2, which essentially means you can lift a small car using a half inch rope made of bamboo fibres.

The property that is most salient for this article is that bamboo fibres can be soft as well as strong. The robe I got for Margaret is made partly with bamboo fibres and partly with organic cotton, and is softer to the touch than regular cotton.

From now on, we will be looking for organic cotton or bamboo clothing when we buy it in order to reduce our chemical burden on the environment.  We don’t buy many clothes (I am an engineer after all, and clothes are merely an annoying necessity to me), but when we do, we will try to create market demand for organic fibres.

By the way, I left the box with the robe and a home-made card for her in the bathroom after she went to bed so that she would find it when she woke up and went to take a shower. She loved the robe, and yes, she did notice it was organic. I just wished she hadn’t rushed back into the bedroom to wake me up and give me a big ole thank you kiss. 7am is the middle of the night, after all, and us engineers need our beauty sleep!