Sustainability: going green at home

What is sustainability? Some people seem to confuse the concept with the more radical idea of foregoing modern technology, and making everyone else forego it, in the name of protecting the environment. Sustainability certainly means protecting the environment, but it does not require imposition of such costly and disruptive measures. Many people who are going green at home by voluntarily making a number of small adjustments to their lifestyles are moving toward true sustainability.


I recently came across an article about using vinegar to clean things at home. It struck me that long before we had competing brand name products that specialize in washing windows, or dishes, or countertops, etc., housewives used vinegar, baking soda, and salt, among other things, for all house cleaning.  People are starting to conclude that these products have a number of advantages:

• They cost less.
• They are more versatile. For example, vinegar can clean your windows, dishes, microwave ovens, and anything with a mineral buildup.
• And so they take up less cabinet space.
• They work just as well and just as easily.

Notice that this compilation of benefits does not include an environmental calculation. People who are using the old-fashioned cleansers instead of modern specialized products may or may not care about sustainability or going green, but the choice does have an environmental impact. It often requires hazardous materials to manufacture the modern products. Any manufacturing process inevitably adds to the pollution of air, water, and/or soil; some manufacturers work hard to minimize it, but too many others don't. Using the products at home puts them in the water supply.

Anything we buy to clean our home must come in some kind of packaging. Vinegar comes in a glass or plastic bottle. Baking soda comes in a cardboard box. Neither presents problems for recycling. But what about all the pump sprayers and aerosol cans required for so many other products? What can be recycled varies from place to place.

So am I suggesting that everyone has to start washing windows with vinegar instead of Windex™? Of course not. Sustainability does not work that way. I am suggesting that virtually every choice we make about what to use at home has an environmental impact. We will all pay for adverse environmental impacts, whether with our health or with tax dollars. Going green means not so much making great sacrifices as making a multitude of small choices that are good for the environment.  These choices often turn out to have a number of other advantages, which some people might consider even more important.

How to recycle Christmas lights

Every year when I put up my Christmas tree, strands of lights that worked the previous year no longer work. This year I got fed up and took advantage of a post-Christmas half-off sale. Now I have LED lights for next year. They will take 80-90% less energy, thus lowering my carbon footprint. So what do I do with all those incandescent Christmas lights I don't intend to use any more? Recycle them of course!

It's not possible just to put Christmas lights in the recycling bin with the wrapping paper, cans and bottles. Most people just throw them in the trash, where they wind up in the landfill. They will never break down like organic material does, but they will degrade enough to contribute hazardous chemicals to the leachate. At any time before they get covered at the end of the day, animals can get into them. As hard as it is for us to untangle lights every year, it can be fatally difficult for animals that get stuck in them. As a nation, we need to make it a habit to recycle Christmas lights (and nearly everything else).

But how? I had never heard of Christmas tree light recycling. Here are some things I learned on line. One way to recycle anything, of course, is to repurpose it. I found a page with lots of neat ideas for craft projects that use old Christmas lights.

Numerous stores accept Christmas lights for recycling. Home Depot, for example, accepted up to 5 strings of incandescent lights from November 4-14 in exchange for $3 coupon for buying LED lights. That's not helpful for people who don't think of Christmas trees that early, but it is the only similar program for which I found information on the company's own web site. (I confess to not looking very hard, though.)

For at least the past two years Walmarts (in St. Louis, at least), accepted lights for recycling. After Christmas 2009 they collected 3 ton of lights -- more than the weight of a car. Also for the past two years, Minnesota residents have been able to take lights to any of 320 recycling locations, and in the process provide work for disabled people. In the program's first year of operation, it collected 50 tons. My search turned up plenty of sites for other seasonal local collection drives.

Some companies accept Christmas lights by mail and recycle them year-round. HolidayLEDs offers a 25% discount coupon by return email. Environmental LED, Christmas Light Source and Five Star Holiday Decor offer a 10% discount. The latter two also donate part of the proceeds to Toys for Tots.

Each of these companies has its own instructions, but basically, send the lights in the smallest possible cardboard box (which the company will also recycle). Do not use any packing material or plastic ties. If you want the discount coupons, include a card with your name, mailing address, and email address as well. For the least environmental impact, mail the lights to whichever company is the shortest distance from your home.

How does recycling Christmas lights work to keep them out of the landfill? After some preliminary sorting to remove anything that is not recyclable, the lights are put through a shredder. Other machines can then separate copper, glass, various plastics, and anything else that might be recyclable. The companies then sell these materials to manufacturers of various kinds of new products.

Green, sustainable Christmas

I keep seeing the statistic that in December (that is, roughly between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day), Americans produce 25% more trash than at any other time of the year. We buy and send Christmas (or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa) presents and cards, along with the attendant wrapping paper, ribbons, and packaging material. In addition to the volume of trash, think of the energy it takes to transport all of that stuff: from materials to factory, from factory to warehouse, from warehouse to store, from store to home, and from home to friends and  loved ones, and ultimately from everyone's homes to the landfill.

There has to be a better way. Most of the following suggestions are given as imperatives, but most of them can include "as much as possible" somewhere. The idea is not to stifle anyone's fun or deprive anyone of presents that they really want or need, just to maximally reduce the waste.

Holiday cards

• Reuse the cards you receive instead of throwing them out. The fronts might make nice tags for next year's gifts. Or, the more artistically minded can make collages that would make nice gifts, or even something to sell at craft fairs, later  on.
• If you do not send a letter with cards, consider postal cards instead to avoid using envelopes.
• Make your own cards.
• I have seen advice to send email or electronic cards instead. Many people find that impersonal and tacky, so you should at least know what your friends think before doing so.

Shopping

• Buy locally made gifts from local stores.
• Plan your shopping trips to travel the least distances and therefore use less gasoline.
• Have a supply of cloth bags and use those instead of bags from the store. Consolidate purchases from different stores into as few bags as possible in order to reuse bags on the same trip.
• If you can't avoid plastic bags, save up a supply and recycle them at a grocery store; most chain stores have receptacles for that purpose.
• Avoid buying disposable gifts, gifts that come with excessive packaging, or gifts made of environmentally sensitive materials.

Wrapping

• Use printed boxes, or even plain white ones, instead of using wrapping paper.
• Use appropriate sized gift bags instead of wrapping paper. After all the presents have been opened, collect and store the bags and reuse them until they fall apart.
• I have seen lots of suggestions for using ribbons from recycled materials, using twine instead of ribbons, or even making bows from old magazines or chips bags. Actually, since the bows don't survive shipping or long trips in the car, I haven't used ribbon for years.
• Likewise, I have seen suggestions for using colorful magazine pages, calendars, even the comic sections of the Sunday papers for wrapping paper. Perhaps some readers know how to do so without making it look as tacky as it sounds!
• Instead of buying tags, use scraps of whatever you use for wrapping paper. If you follow the unwrapped box or gift bag suggestions, tag them in a way that permits them to be reused later, perhaps with a safety pin, a string, or attached to ribbon or twine.

Shipping

• Don't buy packing peanuts, unless you can find biodegradable ones. If you must use packing peanuts, reuse whatever you receive from others. Wadded up newspapers work at least as well.
• Bubble wrap and other air-filled products work the best. When you receive it in various packages, keep it handy for reuse. Some people find it fun to pop bubble wrap, but that reduces it from a reusable product to more waste.
• Reuse boxes that are delivered to your house; recycle them only if they are somehow not fit for reuse.

Celebrating

• Don't use paper plates, disposable flatware, etc. Washing dishes really does beat carrying plastic bags of used disposables to the trash!)
• Cook in washable, not disposable, pans.
• Plan meals and party food carefully to avoid excessive leftovers. Whatever leftovers you will not eat over the next week, freeze it, send it home with guests, or donate it to a local homeless shelter or soup kitchen.
• Don't use a disposable camera.

Recycling

• Each municipality has its own rules for what plastics it will accept and what it will not, but you took that into account before you bought anything, didn't you!
• Plastic bags (and popped bubble wrap?) can be recycled at the grocery.
• I have read that if there is tape on wrapping paper, it can't be recycled; I have also read that it doesn't matter. The truth might vary by municipality, so it's good to ask. If tape is forbidden at your recycling center, it's best to tear off a little tape and put it with the trash than not to recycle the rest of the paper at all.
• Keep in mind that recycled paper and other products become commodities that the municipalities must sell at market prices. Those prices fluctuate with supply and demand. If we produce so much more trash in December than other months, it stands to reason that paper will bring a much lower price as a result.
• If you have a garden, you can choose to compost waste paper instead of recycling it. But please don't throw it out with the trash!
• If you have followed many of these suggestions, you have less waste than in previous years. Of course, no matter how careful you are about disposing of waste, it's best not to generate it in the first place.

Five easy ways to reduce your environmental impact

When it comes to the environment, there seem to be two extremes in this country. The left extreme warns of the impending doom resulting from climate change caused by human activity. They might be right about that, but I doubt it. Their solution entails sweeping reforms intended to make the whole human race stop adding pollutants to the environment at all, preferably imposed by an international treaty.

That will never happen. World leaders came to some kind of basic agreement with the so-called Kyoto accords. The U.S. refused to ratify it, and no country that did ratify it has actually imposed those harsh regulations on their own people. All signatories seem to regard the treaty as binding primarily everyone else. It would have been just as futile if we had ratified it.

The right extreme insists that whatever climate change is actually happening has purely natural causes, changes that have happened before as part of a natural cycle that has been going on for eons. Therefore, they say, human activity plays no part in climate change. They might be right about that, but I doubt it. Their position seems to be that there is no problem and therefore nothing needs to be done at all. And whatever we do, raising any tax for any reason is completely unacceptable.

Even if they are right on climate change, reasons abound why we must take decisive action sooner rather than later. We buy oil from one set of enemies and adversaries by borrowing money from another set of enemies and adversaries. Polluted air, water, and ground has made many people sick, which, among other consequences, burdens our health care system. We accumulate tons of trash and garbage by the hour, rapidly filling up available landfills. But of course, no one wants to build any more nearby. And so it goes.

Now that extremists on both sides have gained excessive influence in our political process and can nominate their own people for political office at the expense of centrists who will actually identify and face our real problems, there is no point in waiting for Congress to pass any meaningful legislation. Likewise, we can't afford to wait for regulatory agencies to act either responsibly or consistently.

There are some simple things we as individuals can do in the mean time that will make a modest but real difference. Here are five:

1. Carry and use cloth bags for shopping--not just grocery shopping, but any shopping. That will keep plastic bags out of the landfills, reduce paper manufacture and the pollutions that comes with it, and all of the energy costs associated with transporting paper and plastic bags from factory to warehouses to stores to landfills.
2. Plan errands to do several on the same trip, making a more or less circular route. That is, avoid driving to one place, back home, and then someplace else. Also, avoid any other back-tracking as much as possible. If everyone or nearly everyone does so, it will keep us from buying quite as much foreign oil.
3. Stop using drive-through lanes, especially when the line is long and it might take five minutes or more to get your products. Park the car and go inside the store. That will not only save the gas you use while idling in the line, it will also reduce the exhaust fumes that everyone in line has to breathe. Plus you'll burn a few more calories standing in the store than sitting in the car.
4. Don't buy any more incandescent light bulbs. I know that CFLs take too long to get bright enough. I know that when they burn out, they become hazardous waste. But they're already much better than when they first came out. LEDs have hit the stores now. They're probably superior to CFLs in almost every way, except for the exorbitant price tag. The fact of the matter, however, is that before much longer, the manufacture of incandescent bulbs will be illegal. The more expensive CFLs and LEDs will quickly pay for themselves in savings on your electric bill.
5. Plug your television, sound system, computer and peripherals, and other electronics into a power strip and turn them off at the power strip. They use up quite a bit of electricity even after you turn them off.

These ideas may seem small and petty. If only a few people take these steps, it will make no overall difference. But there are hundreds of millions of people in this country. If sizable number of us all get into the habit of adopting these and/or other similar small steps, we can cumulatively make a very noticeable difference. Who knows? Perhaps we can even manage to call our politicians back to the center so they can do their jobs.

Biogas as an example of waste to energy

We throw lots of stuff away in this country. We used to just have it hauled to a dump, but that was smelly and attracted vermin. No one wanted to live or be near one. Eventually the dump morphed into the sanitary landfill, but no one wants to live or be near one of those, either. Landfills produce two kinds of byproduct: biogas and leachate. Biogas, at least, can play a vital role in turning waste to energy

If a landfill is at least 40 feet deep and contains at least a millions tons of waste, it is practical to recover that biogas. It has too little methane and too much carbon dioxide for use as fuel. But it is not difficult to upgrade it to turn this waste to energy for either pipeline distribution or use as a vehicle fuel, just like natural gas.

Even if somehow we could reform our ways and never create any waste at all for landfills (a human impossibility, I'm sure), our bodies will still produce waste as a byproduct of eating. And so will the animals we raise for food. Human wastes get carried by sewers to water treatment plants. Reclamation of the water leaves sludge behind. The treatment plants all have sanitary methods of disposing of the sludge. Manure from hogs and cattle too often winds up in waste lagoons. They probably smell worse and produce more health hazards than the old city dumps ever did.

Again, the biogas produced can power waste to energy projects. Anaerobic microbes, that is, those who do not live on air, produce the biogas. Landfills by design facilitate anaerobic digestion. Producing biogas from sewage sludge, agricultural wastes, food-industry wastes, or other other organic industrial wastes requires construction of special anaerobic digestion plants.

Engineers at Hewlett Packard examined turning waste to energy. They determined that, when converted to biogas, manure from 10,000 dairy cows could power 1,000 servers. Since the average dairy farm has fewer than 1,000 cows, a data center powered by dairy waste is probably impractical. On the other hand, many farms could probably produce enough power for themselves and get off the grid. State and federal grants for installing the waste to energy technology would mean that it would pay for itself in about four years.

If exploited to the fullest, turning biogas from these organic wastes into energy could satisfy a significant portion of natural gas consumption worldwide. For that to happen here, Americans would have to be willing to allow the changes in our tax structure necessary to encourage building and installing all of the necessary digestion plants and distribution centers. Biogas has the potential to transform organic waste from a health hazard to a useful resource and turn natural gas into a partially renewable energy source.

Recycling Styrofoam

Recycling of steel or aluminum cans, glass jars and bottles, and various paper products became established relatively quickly. It is harder to recycle plastic, and consumers are used to looking for a number within the recycling logo. Many municipalities accept only numbers 1 and 2. Styrofoam, Dow's trademarked name for polystyrene, number 6, has until recently not been recyclable at all.

That has been a real environmental problem, especially for coffee cups and various food containers made of Styrofoam. Too many people toss trash out of their car windows. Styrofoam, being very lightweight, does not stay put. If no one picks it up, it will eventually be lifted by rainwater and make its way to streams, rivers, and ultimately out to sea. There are some huge garbage patches out in the middle of the ocean, and whether on land or sea, animals can eat it. They can't digest it, so it blocks their digestive tract. They starve to death.

Recently, some companies have figured out how to recycle it. A company in North Carolina makes it into picture frames. It apparently has no web site, so the link is to a TV news story. I found a web site for another company in Washington. Both of them (and certainly some others around the country) rely on industrial waste rather than curbside recycling for their supply of Styrofoam. These companies therefore do not represent a solution to Styrofoam' environmental problems, but at least they are a step in the right direction.

An infinitely renewable energy source: waste

Although the concept is hotly debated, sooner or later the world will run out of oil. It will take longer to run out of coal, but that, too, is not a renewable resource. Trees are renewable resources, but of course they have far more important uses than burning them for energy. We usually think of solar, wind, and geothermal power as renewable, but the US, anyway, produces so much garbage, sewage, and other waste that it raises the danger of running out of landfill space. Let's turn all that waste to energy.

Most waste disposal in the US happens either in landfills or incinerators, and no one particularly likes either one of them. In Greensboro, North Carolina, for example, residents of the area around the landfill finally succeeded in getting it closed to anything but construction rubble. The landfill was there before any of the houses, but in the days of segregation, blacks could not purchase property anywhere else. Now, the city must haul trash to a landfill in another county, which costs millions of dollars a year more than operating its own landfill.

Landfills themselves are non-renewable resources. They must have certain geological characteristics, which do not exist everywhere. One difference between an old-fashioned garbage dump and a modern landfill is that each day's trash must be covered with a layer of dirt to control odor and vermin. That means that it fills to capacity sooner. Meanwhile, because landfills also require a liner and the garbage in it is not exposed to air, lettuce that was just beginning to rot when it was thrown out years ago has not decomposed any more in the landfill.

So far, I have considered only household trash. Wastewater treatment plants take in raw sewage and return clean water to lakes and streams. Think of all the leftover solid sludge!  Industry produces its own waste. Waste from poultry and meat producers includes manure, which too often winds up on open-air lagoons, and billions of pounds of feathers.

There are lots of ways to turn our wastes from a problem to a resource. Here are just a few, some of which are becoming commonplace in other industrialized countries:

• Make the garbage and all those feathers into biodiesel. Use that to replace petroleum-based diesel. Of course, many other agricultural wastes can also become biodiesel. Households would have to keep "wet" garbage separate from "dry" garbage, as was normal as recently as 50 years ago.
• Turn household wastes into energy. The heat released by incinerating garbage works just as well as coal for boiling water, which is the normal way to generate electricity. It can also activate thermo-photovoltaic cells to generate additional electricity.
• Turn sewage sludge into ethanol. That will have the added benefit of turning corn back into a food source instead of a particularly costly and inefficient fuel source.
• Scientists are also exploring ways to make electricity from sludge.

There are so many ways to extract energy from waste (including waste heat from running appliances!) that there is no excuse to keep importing fossil fuels. American society needs to get past the increasingly mindless debates over global warming, climate change, where to drill to increase domestic oil supplies, and what kind of taxes to pay in order to make a transition to more environmentally friendly fuels. We need to get on with the urgent business of using our garbage problem to solve our fuel problem, regardless of whether we prefer Al Gore's rhetoric or Sarah Palin's.