Greening my House

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!

I just got our Aug/Sept utility bill from our city. Our water usage has gone down from last year! Woo hoo

Last year: 46  units (34,408 gallons)
This year: 41 units (30,668 gallons)
Percentage saved: ~11%
Money saved: $20.40 — not big, but hey, it’s something

Now those kind of savings will not continue throughout the year. Our water usage goes from about 10 to 15 units during the winter months up to 40 to 50 units in the summer, due mostly to watering the lawn and garden. It’s more difficult to save when the water units are low already, so we will probably only be saving at this rate in the late spring through early fall.

There are a number of things we can do:

• The quick and cheap solution is to spread low-water grass seeds everywhere, then water less. I did spread some Tall Fescue seed blend from Pennington Seed, which claims to require about 30% less water than regular grass, about 6 weeks ago. I also turned down the length of time that the sprinklers come on automatically by about 20%. The new grass is coming up nicely and is very green, but it will take until next year before I can see if it really makes a difference to the water bill.
• Planting low-water seeds are a good first step, but it only buys you a percentage. Eventually, I would like to turn the front yard into a xeriscape. What that means is that you plant native, low-water plants that do not require supplemental irrigation, bringing our water usage down to the winter levels all year long. These plants live off the water that naturally falls from the sky in the area where you are located. If done right, a xeriscaped yard does not have to look like an ugly, rock-laden, prickly cactus garden. They can be nicely designed with decorative stones, and use low-water plants other than succulents. (Though succulents are a good choice here!) We are planning on redesigning our front yard anyways to make it more usable, so this project will have to wait until then.
• Install a rain-water cachement system, or a cistern. Basically, what this means is that you harvest natural rainfall and store it in a big container. This may be the next thing that I do, since we have a flat roof above our garage and it already has a drain down the side. All I have to do is capture that water in a barrel, and then install a little pump to water the garden with it.
• Install drip irrigation instead of the sprinklers. Sprinklers are pretty inefficient. Just take a look at the amount of water that runs off your lawn when you sprinkle! That water is lost, and worse yet, it is carrying away wasted fertilizer that can pollute streams, rivers, and even oceans. (See the post on green laundry below, which talks about the phosphates that are also used in fertilizers and why it is bad that they get into the water system.) Drip irrigation uses less water, delivers the water better to the plants at a slower pace, and does not carry away the fertilizers meaning you can use less fertilizer. I’ve already installed drip irrigation in the garden, and everything is growing like nuts. (see the pictures in the right column!)
• Continue with the navy showers as mentioned in one of the first posts to this blog. Altogether, navy showers should save us about 1200 gallons or so per person during the 2 month billing period.
• Install a grey water system. What that means is that you capture used water from your sinks, bathtubs, showers, dishwashers, and washing machines, and store it for later in a big tank. If you only use eco-friendly soaps and toothpastes, then you can use this water to irrigate your plants. If it is clean enough, you could also use it to fill your toilets, reusing the water a second time within your home. The results from toilets (known as black water or sewage) are required to go into the sewer system though because of health concerns, and you must be careful that the grey water system is separate from the black water system. You also have to be careful when getting a grey water system though because they often cause problems with county and city bylaws. Many counties and cities outlaw them outright. Check your bylaws first before you spend time and money on this idea. Also, grey water systems are a little expensive, as they require some plumbing work to replumb the water to the tank, and to put in a pump to water your plants from that tank.

I’ll let you know if and when I get around to doing any of the above!

Today, I am blogging to request your support in for the nomination of the Green Party. I promise that when I am president, I will make sure that the Green Party will have:

• live music
• good food
• good booze
• good friends
• perhaps some shenanigans later in the evening after the good booze has taken effect, and maybe even have the cops come and tell us to simmer down

Yes. I’m talking about throwing a party. A green party. A real green party!

What’s that you say? You thought that “green party” meant a political organization? Haha, yeah right. Me? Politics?

What I am talking about throwing a party that has all the fun of a regular party, but less of an impact on the environment.

A few weeks ago was my 40th birthday. Yeah, I’m getting old, just like you. My wife, who is a little bit older than me wanted to throw a big ole bash to celebrate me “catching up” to her. We had all the elements listed above, including a live rock band. But, this time, we decided we would try to make it more green than our previous parties.

The Drinks — Ditch the Plastic Water Bottle

Americans drink about 28 billion water bottles a year, and 80 percent of them end up in landfills. The bottles themselves are PET plastic. They are recyclable, but most people do not bother — especially at a party. Though this only accounts for one third of one percent of the total volume of garbage at a landfill, it is not necessary.

The bottles also require about 17 million barrels of oil to produce, and the production produces between 2 and 3 million tonnes of CO2, plus energy costs and the carbon it produces.

Once the bottle is made and filled with water, it is shipped around the country, wasting even more energy and carbon in the transportation because water is relatively heavy. Orange juice manufacturers ship dehydrated frozen juice around to save money for this very reason, and you have to reconstitute it at home. Yet, we still ship the water all over.

Even worse, everyone assumes that bottled water tastes better, has less pollutants than tap water, and is just plain better for you. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, this is often not the case. They have found that many bottled waters contain various toxins just like tap water.

When you think about it, why are they bottling water in Fiji and spending all that energy to ship it half way across the globe to us? What? We don’t have clean drinking water here at home?

So what we did is get a ceramic urn. A big one (3.5 gallons), with a dispenser spout at the bottom. We filtered regular tap water with our Brita filter and put it in. Then, in went a whole, sliced lemon for flavour and a bunch of ice to keep it cold. Then, we put out a stack of cups beside a few markers. A note next to the markers asked people to write their names on their cups and reuse them all night for all their drinks, from the sangria to the water.

And people did!

We went though about 100 cups for about 80 guests (84 with the band members!). The guests drank a total of about 9 gallons of water, 2 gallons of sangria, and 1 gallon of lemon drops, and 4 cases of wine. (They also drank beer, but not from cups.) Altogether that is about 230 drinks in cups, which means people used their cups just over 2 times each. In terms of the water alone, the 9 gallons represents about 70 bottles of water that were not used for the party.

In terms of the beers and sodas, we used glass bottles and aluminum cans. What we could have done to reduce the impact further is rent two small kegs for the beer, which are of course reusable. That also that the advantage the beer tastes better because it is on draught, and we could have gotten some microbrews instead of the national brands we bought. Oh well, there will be another party some time!

The Food — Hmm, Hmm, Good!

We ordered the food in from a local BBQ restaurant that does catering. They don’t have any organic options, but we did choose the pulled pork and BBQ chicken, which produces less carbon when you raise them than beef. We also had some sliced beef brisket because certain BBQ aficionados amongst my friends would have complained that it wasn’t “real” Texas BBQ without it, but we were heavier on the chicken and pork than the beef. We topped it off with corn bread, regular wheat buns for the pulled pork, baked jalapeno beans, a green salad, potato salad, and some cheeses and fruits. Most of the food was produced right here in the US and didn’t have to travel that far to get to our table.

Still, we could have done better if we had made the food ourselves. We wanted to enjoy the party though instead of spending all night finishing food. It is difficult to find restaurants that publish info about the environmental impact of the food they serve, but it is heartening to note that restaurants are starting to realize that they can and should go green too. This blog article talks about green restaurants.

We did make the appetizers ourselves. We had a caprese salad on a toothpick. A piece of tomato from our garden, a leaf of basil, also from our garden, and a slice of fresh mozzarella. The mozzarella was not from our garden, seeing as we don’t have any room to raise a cow. Maybe when we get old and have a big ole farm, we may get a cow. But for now, the backyard is the exclusive domain of our cats and a few random squirrels.

Plates and Utensils — Eat Green

There are disposable plates, and there are recyclable plates, and then there are compostable plates.

Disposable plates can be made of plastic or plastic foam. That’s not so green. It goes right into the landfill and takes about 500 years to degrade. Even then, once it is degraded, it does not necessarily return the ecosystem.

You might think that paper plates are green. After all, they are made of paper, a natural wood product. However, there are paper plates, and there are paper plates with coating to prevent the dreaded soggy plate syndrome. Unfortunately, most plates are the latter. The coating is often a thin layer of plastic, which is of course not very biodegradable. Sometimes it is wax, which is better because at least it is a natural substance.

In terms of compostable plates, there are various different materials on the market such as the traditional wood, fibres from sugar cane waste (known as bagasse), and bamboo fibres, as well as many other fibres.

What we got is the unglazed or uncoated paper plates. They are just plain wood paper pressed into a pretty rigid shape. With a little shredding, they should be quite compostable, food specs and all.

One interesting development is the availability of plastic plates and implements made of potato starch or corn starch plastic. This is called Plastic Starch Material. These sort of materials can be used just like regular petroleum-based plastics, but they are compostable in 180 days like regular biodegradable materials under ideal composting conditions.

Mater-Bi (main component corn-starch), and PolyActide (PLA) (made from corn-starch as well) are currently the 2 main resins (raw materials), being used today in the production of compostable & biodegradable plastics and are certified for compostability under standards set by international organizations.  However, other resins are coming into the market made from potato starch, soybean protein, cellulose etc.  Most of these are currently not certified for compostability, though some are for biodegradability.

One idea we didn’t do but thought about for future parties is finger foods. Serve only things that are not messy and can be eaten without utensils. Chips and salsa. Crudites. Veggies and dip. For one thing, this type of food is more convenient for parties, and for another, they don’t produce any utensil wastes. Plus, they are fun, light, and small — perfect party food!

Recycling — Make it Easy

At most parties I’ve been to, there are a few garbage cans strategically placed where you can chuck all your wastes. At ours, there was a huge, very clearly marked bin for glass/aluminum, and another for paper plates and napkins, and a third for all other garbage. I’m happy to say that most people stuck to the plan, and deposited the right things in the right bins. Various people told me that the huge signs made it easy and they wouldn’t otherwise have taken the time in a party to separate out the recyclables.

Heating — What you Need for California Summer Nights

Here in California, it is nice and warm during the day. But we have a dry heat, and when the sun goes down, so does the temperature. The cold air off the ocean creeps in, and soon everyone wants to move the party inside.

Except of course, we don’t have room for 80 people inside. We wanted to keep people out in the back yard as long as possible. So, we decided to provide heating.

What we did is set up a firepit with local, seasoned firewood from a friend’s ranch. Not only did this have a nice smell and an ambiance like a campfire, it does not release “extra” carbon into the atmosphere. What I mean is that the carbon that is released by burning the wood was originally captured by the trees in the first place when they grew. We are not increasing the carbon in the atmosphere with fossil fuels by burning wood.

However, fires are not the most green way to heat. There is the matter of particulate pollution and oxides of nitrogen and such. Anything that burns hot also oxidizes the nitrogen in the air as it is burning, producing nitrous oxides that form the basis for smogs and help produce acid rain. Also, the smoke itself is an aerosol that can stay afloat in the atmosphere for months before settling, effectively becoming part of the air pollution.

However, you have to pick the least of two evils. Burning wood occurs naturally via forest fires, and the eco-systems have mechanisms to deal with it. But there is no mechanism to deal with huge increases in CO2 in the atmosphere. So, for us during this party, wood was the way to go.

Lighting — The Ambiance is Green

If people are going to stay outside, they have to be able to see each other.

What we did is two things. We have all white LED Christmas lights and also white LED rope lighting. If you have read previous blog entries, you would remember that LED lighting uses about 1/10 the energy for the same light output as regular incandescent bulbs do. LEDs in this situation also have the advantage that they are pretty soft lighting and look nice too. I remember sitting in European outdoor cafes with the lights strung overhead on our trips over there, and that is exactly the sort of feeling these lights gave.

Other things we could have done, but didn’t do: tiki torches. The oil can come from renewable sources (a biofuel!) and if you get the citronella oil, it also helps keep the bugs away.

Overall, a good time was had by everyone and many people didn’t realize it was a somewhat more green party than usual. They just remember the ambiance, the good music, food, and drink, and of course the good company. And hopefully I can forget the fact that I turned 40. Hah!

Greenwashing is a term coined to give a name to the practicing of some companies claiming to be green in their marketing when they actually aren’t. But, that is not what I’m talking about here!

I’m talking about being more green while washing your laundry. There are many chemicals we use to wash our laundry, many of the just plain bad. Bad for you, and bad for the environment.

Laundry Detergent

First, let’s talk about laundry detergent. It contains a number of chemicals in it that are just plain nasty. These are used as surfactants, fabric softeners, and colour enhancers. Worse living through chemistry!

Phosphates

The worst of all the chemicals in laundry detergent are phosphates because they are bad for the environment when they are mined, and bad for the environment after they are used. Double whammy!

Many, if not most, laundry detergents use some form of phosphates to increase the surfactant effect of the detergent. That basically means it disperses oils better, which is what you want when you are trying to get those oils out of your clothes and into the water to be whisked away.

Unfortunately, phosphates are also one of the three prime ingredients in artificial fertilizers. (The others being nitrogen and potassium — but that’s another blog post!)

Why is that a problem?

Well, these phosphates get into the drain water, which gets into the waste water system of your town or county where it is “cleaned” (not really), then into the rivers and streams, and eventually end up in the ocean. Combine this with fertilizers that are actually used on your lawns, gardens, and even on farms. It all gets washed downstream to the ocean.

What happens is this artificial fertilizer then causes massive algae blooms around the mouths of these large rivers such as the Mississippi or the Columbia river. Algae are essentially tiny organisms that get fertilized massively and grow like mad. This fertilization of the water is called eutrophication. What happens is that these organisms use up all the oxygen in the water to create a hypoxic environment. Below a certain oxygen level, fish in that water end up suffocating and dying, and all the fish or mammals that eat those other fish also experience problems because their food has died off. The area where all the fish die is known as a dead zone, and the one around the mouth of the Mississippi River this year was one of the largest ever because of fertilizers, and also because of the floods we had this spring in the mid-west washing them all down stream.

Dead zones have implications for humans not just because we have ruined an eco-system, but also economically. The shrimp industry in the Gulf around New Orleans is suffering massively, as is the fishing industry. Boats have to go a huge distance to find oxygen rich waters where their catch can survive. And the problem is getting worse as we use more and more phosphates.

The worst part is that phosphates are not only nasty after they are used, but they are nasty to produce as well! Mining phosphate ore releases flourides into watersheds. These are not the flourides that are added to drinking water to help your teeth. Many of the flourides released by mining phosphate rich ores are just plain toxic. They were doing fine in the ground there until we started releasing them into the environment in massive amounts!

Even worse, many phosphate rich ores such as phosphogypsum naturally contain radioactive materials, specifically uranium. This is not in quantities and concentrations that we can use for nuclear power, but it is radioactive enough to cause health problems. Once the phosphates get extracted from the phosphogypsum, the results are lots of plain gypsum that happens to be slightly radioactive.

You might be tempted to think, “hey, let’s press that into drywall and use them in our houses!”. A good plan, but unfortunately the radioactivity is at a high enough level that it can’t be used that way and it can’t be cleaned of its uranium easily. The difficulty in cleaning it means that the use of this type of gypsum is banned in many jurisdictions. It just sits there in massive piles and becomes an eco-hazard on its own. There is a billion ton pile sitting in central Florida for example, that no-one really knows what to do with, or at least has the political will to do anything about it. Slowly slowly, the rains are washing it away…

Allergies

Another big problem with laundry detergents is with such a wide variety of chemicals in each one, many people have become allergic to them. Some brands such as Tide have an “allergy free” formula now because of this problem.

One syndrome that has become much more prevalent in the last 100 years is Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS). Essentially this syndrome causes people to become hypersensitive to a wide variety of chemicals. There is no real consensus amongst medical researchers as to what the cause of it is or even that it exists as a single definable syndrome, but one theory is that long-term contact with various chemicals somehow creates these sensitivities. Reducing exposure to various chemicals may not help this syndrome, but it can’t hurt! Maybe we should avoid them if we don’t really understand what they do to our bodies?

Besides laundry detergent, there are a few other things we add to our wash that wreak havoc on the environment…

Bleach

Bleach is a chlorine based chemical used to whiten and optically brighten colours in clothes. There are many different types of bleach, but the liquid we are most familiar with is sodium hypochlorite.

The problem is that bleach survives the wash and makes its way into the environment like phosphates. When this chemical comes in contact with any type of acid, as it might in sewage water, the chlorine part of the molecule is liberated and can combine with other nearby molecules. This can form many different types of chlorinated volatile organic compounds (chlorinated VOCs) such as chloroform and certain types of dioxins which are known human carcinogens and have other negative effects on the body. These chlorinated VOCs can stick around for quite a while, becoming persistent organic pollutants which can accumulate over time in the bodies of animals, including humans.

Fabric Softener

Fabric softener also introduces a whole host of chemicals into the environment, some of which are not good. There are a few based on various oils, which are more natural softeners and which are preferred.

So What Can I Do?

Well, you don’t need phosphates for a detergent, and you don’t need all sorts of weird chemicals! People washed their clothes just fine for thousands of years before all these chemicals were invented/discovered and added to detergent to improve various characteristics. There are new brands coming on the market that try to avoid all the problems listed above.

We have switched to a brand of detergent that is now being sold in Costco called “Ecos“. It contains no phosphates or bleach, has a soy-based fabric softener, and only uses natural oils and surfactants (such as magnolia and lavender) that can be easily biodegraded once they get into the environment. Best of all, the price is right in line with all the other non-green products at Costco, so there is no extra cost to switching.

We tried it, and there was no drop in the quality of the cleaning. Our clothes felt as clean as they normally do. I think we’ll stick with it!

Other brands that may be more available where you live:

• Planet
• Ecover
• Seventh Generation
• Method
• The Clean Environment Company

Another advantage of using “green” phosphate and chlorine-free detergents comes if you have a grey water system or a septic tank at your house. A gray water system is one that reuses water from your shower, kitchen sink, or water from the laundry that is not really that dirty. It puts this water to use in places where you don’t need 100% clean water, such as watering your garden or flushing your toilet. If the detergent you are using to wash your clothes is biodegradable and non-toxic, it won’t kill your plants when used with a gray water system, and it won’t harm the bacteria doing their job if you have a septic tank.

No, this posting is not about a civil rights movement for the undead. Vampire power is the power that your electrical and electronic equipment uses when it is turned off.

I can just hear what you are thinking, “Wait a second. Didn’t you just write “turned off”??? If the devices are turned off, why would there be any power usage?”

The reasons are twofold.

First, many devices are not really off when you turn them off. No, really! They actually go into a low power usage “standby” mode. The whole purpose of this mode is to wait for you to turn them back on again. That means they have to use a little bit of electricity to power the button or infrared device that turns them back on again.

Second, some devices have a transformer attached to step down the 110V alternating current electricity coming out of your wall socket into nice, gentle 5 to 12V direct current electricity that can be used directly. The problem is because of the way many transformers are designed — they use electricity even when things are not plugged in to them. They can use as much as 5% of their regular fully-loaded amount while sitting there unused. This energy is dissipated by way of heat, which is why transformers get hot.

Five percent doesn’t sound like much… but when you add it up over the whole of the US, it can mean billions of kilowatt hours of wasted energy — all while doing nothing!

Kill-A-Watt

No, it’s not another reference to the undead. A kill-a-watt is a device by P3 International that measures electrical usage of anything that is plugged into it. You plug the kill-a-watt into the socket, and then plug your device into the kill-a-watt, and it can tell you how much electricity is being used by that device.

Our friends Eric and Anne have one of them and they let us borrow it recently. I went around and analysed the electricity usage for all sorts of things that we plug in.

The results are tabulated on the page “Usage at our house” listed in the column to the right.

The total is nasty:

Devices that are supposedly “off”: 7.5W
Devices left on all the time: 126W
Total: 133.5W

Multiply that out to find how much it costs:

133.5 W = 0.1335 kW
0.1335 kW * 24 hours a day * 365 days a year = 1169 kWh a year
1169 kWh * $0.22 /kWh = $257 a year!

Woah! That’s a lot wasted on doing nothing!

Now, to be fair, a few things must be left on all the time, or else they are not useful. These are:

• tivo
• dsl modem
• wireless router
• cordless phone
• fridge

The total usage of these devices is 66W. Calculating out, those devices use $127 a year. That still means that there are $257 – $127 = $130 worth of devices doing nothing.

In the coming months, I will be finding ways of reducing this usage.

Please note that the numbers above don’t include all the things that are connected to the electrical mains but which are not pluggable, so I cannot use the kill-a-watt to measure their electrical usage. Things that are on all the time but which are not measurable include:

• garage door opener
• garden lights
• main refrigerator
• trash compactor
• washer
• dryer
• dish washer
• stove/oven

Fortunately, many of those devices have physical switches, so they only use electricity when they are turned on and operating. It would not make any fiscal sense to replace any of them just for the purposes of reducing power usage. However, in the future, if any of these things need to be replaced, energy efficiency will be one of the top criterion for selecting the replacements.

Earth

Thirty-eight years ago, one of the two commonly observed Earth Day celebrations was created by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson to be celebrated on April 22, 1970. Yes, of all people it was a politician! I’m not making this up! Since that time, it has grown from a fringe, grassroots sort of celebration an almost mainstream thing. The idea behind it was to foster greater awareness of environmental issues with the general public.

So I thought if this is a green blog, I should probably post something for Earth Day. I figured, heck, what is more appropriate for Earth Day than earth itself? I write “earth” with a small “e” because I mean “dirt”, not the proper name of the planet as a whole.

What the Heck are you Going on About Now, Edwin?

Recently, I checked out the web site of my local waste management company, Allied Waste. It seemed pretty scary to me if waste got together in an alliance like that, so I had to be sure… Okay, so now I’m just being silly.

One thing I noticed on the AW web site is that they are giving away free compost. What? FREE? Yes, that’s right, it’s free. Can’t beat that. It’s the compost made from all the green waste collected from all the SF Bay Area green bins, including ours. All I had to do is prove I’m a resident, and I could pick up one free cubic yard of compost. This spring, they had two pick up dates, and the most recent was last Saturday.

Here is the compost in boxes:

Mostly Organic

Compost from a company like this is mostly organic fertilizer. I say “mostly” because you never know what sort of strange things people put into their green bins. It may include chemicals, pesticides, and other things that shouldn’t be there. For example, I found a few strings and pieces of plastic bags in my load. But, on the whole, it should be pretty much composed of just yard trimmings, and therefore mostly organic.

A study by the University of Washington in 2000 found traces of the herbacides clopyralid and picloram in municipal composts. These affect broad leaf plants, and therefore are not good to put in your garden. Clopyrid was subsequently deregistered for lawn uses, and is usually not found in compost any more. However, picloram is still a possible problem.

Another possible problem is plant diseases that survive composting at insufficient temperatures. The temperatures in a municipal compost heat may not be sufficient for heat-sterilizing the microbes, fungus, etc. Usually, however, municipal composting is done in very large heaps and there is nowhere for the heat to go, so it gets pretty hot.

I am going to try using the compost anyways. Picloram can be degraded in soil by microbes, and can be leached from the soil in water. I will let the amended soil sit for a number of days before planting my plants in hopes that any traces of nasty stuff like that might leach out first, and that beneficial bacteria and insects will find their way into the compost first.

Here’s what it looked like as I was incorporating it into the garden soil:

The compost was pretty smelly. It smelled like a combination of cigar, earth, and garbage. I am not sure it was finished composting actually, as compost I have smelled before pretty much only had the “earthy” part of the smell. Here, you can see the compost and soil mixed and set up into nice furrows. I will plant the tomatoes and basil on these furrows.

Have a happy earth day, and try to do something “green” yourself. The more of us that participate, the better!