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.

What's coming: environmental crisis or sustainability?

In An Essay on the Principal of Population (1798), Thomas Malthus argued that world’s population would eventually and inevitably outgrow the resources available to sustain it. His ideas have been very influential as late as Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb and Garrett Hardin’s article “The Tragedy of the Commons” (both 1968).

Today many follow the reasoning of Malthus, Ehrlich, and Hardin and vociferously warn that an environmental catastrophe is inevitable unless the world’s governments take drastic action to prevent it. Meanwhile, the world’s population on the whole thrives nicely despite being much larger than Malthus’ greatest nightmare. The doomsayers are wrong for much the same reason that Malthus was wrong. They lack both imagination and faith in individuals and communities to make wise decisions.

Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for her work in debunking Hardin’s article. He had told a parable in which villagers used a common pasture. Each was motivated to get as much use out of the pasture as possible, and together they overused it and destroyed it. Only regulation or private ownership of all resources could prevent this tragedy.

According to Ostrom’s research, many communities have successfully regulated common resources among themselves for centuries. While Hardin’s scenario does indeed happen far to often (witness overfishing of several different species in recent years), it is not inevitable. Successful management of resources at the local level can have as widely beneficial effect as mismanagement has a widely catastrophic effect.

Hardin’s followers insist on sweeping governmental initiatives at the national and international level, despite the fact that distant bureaucracies have a very poor record of adequate management and regulation. Suppose, for example, if the federal government tried to mandate commuting to work by bicycle. That would surely make the argument over President Obama’s health care plan seem like a card party by comparison. And yet if enough city governments build bike trails, people will use them and reduce carbon emissions significantly.

Consider the following facts:

• Cheese makers in the Swiss Alps have successfully managed their commons for 800 years.
• Many (but certainly not all) communities in China have regulated their commons for even longer, and the Chinese reforestation rate exceeds most of the rest of the world.
• The American west seems to have reached peak water in the 1970s, but no one noticed until recently.
• More and more American businesses are turning to green technology to help their bottom line.

The world can make sustainable use of its resources. The more national governments encourage local initiatives (public sector, but especially private sector), the less need there will be for top-down regulation. The question is not whether an environmental catastrophe can be avoided, but if a critical mass of people will see the advantages of more cooperation and longer-term thinking.

Sources:
The Non-Tragedy of the Commons by John Tierney
A Conversation with the 2009 Nobel Prize Winner in Economics by Jennifer Schonberger

Why green buildings are worth the cost

The erection of a “green” school or other public building can easily draw cries of dismay or even outrage, because sustainable design and building cost more than traditional techniques. For the same reason, people planning a new house might shy away from requesting green features that add so much to the upfront cost.

While green buildings are initially more expensive, they cost less to operate. While solar panels or windmills might be nice to have, sustainable design and building do not depend on such features. It is possible to design windows that both let in natural light, thus diminishing the need for artificial lighting, and minimize heat transfer, thus diminishing the costs of heating and air conditioning.

Retractable awnings, carefully placed trees and landscaping, and other design choices can let sunlight into a room without the sun ever shining directly on a window. Programmable thermostats can save money on heating and air conditioning. It is even possible to install occupancy sensors in order to turn lights on automatically and adjust the temperature when someone enters a room and turn the lights off and readjust the temperature when they find that the room has been empty for a certain amount of time.

In recent decades, builders have provided sealed buildings. It is impossible to open windows for fresh air. Initially, it seemed like a good idea, but the air quality in these buildings has too often turned out to be worse than that of outside air. In fact, the effects of poor indoor air quality have been identified as the “sick building syndrome.”

Sustainable design and building pays close attention to interior air quality. The windows open to let in fresh air, but if the outside air is for any reason unhealthy, they close tightly enough to prevent either pollutants from coming in or heat or cooling from escaping. The healthy interior of a green office building can reduce absenteeism and boost productivity as workers are both physically and emotionally healthier. A green house or apartment building likewise helps its residents’ health and ability to work, entertain, run errands, etc.

Because the design of green buildings conserves so much water and energy, the savings will more than cover the initial higher costs, usually within a year. Because sustainable design and building also enhances the health of the building’s occupants, green building also saves money on health and insurance costs. As a result, when it comes time to sell the building, it will command a higher cost.

Besides my own knowledge and experience, much of the content of this post has come from “Benefits of Green Buildings.”  The same author has written in more detail in “Building Green: Which Materials and Techniques Should Be Used in Green Architecture.” The previous post in this blog examined the green design and construction of a luxury hotel.

Sustainable design and building: green and profitable

Is concern for the environment incompatible with running a profitable business? Do "green" processes make new construction too expensive? Dennis Quaintance, CEO of Quaintance-Weaver Restaurants & Hotels, based in Greensboro, North Carolina, didn't think so when he decided to design a new luxury hotel and restaurant. He decided to maximize use of sustainable design and operation principles for his building project.

The Proximity Hotel and Print Works Bistro, which opened in 2007, earned LEED Platinum certification, but didn't cost much more to build than it would have using more conventional techniques. The company's commitment to sustainable design and building demonstrates that a large new development can be both green and profitable.

LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is the certification program of the U.S. Green Building Council. It provides independent verification that a building meets certain standards for energy savings, water efficiency, reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, the quality of its indoor environment, stewardship of natural resources, and sensitivity to environmental impact of its construction and operation.

Besides using 39% less energy and 33% less water, Quaintance-Weaver recycled construction debris, used recycled content, cut down on transportation costs by maximizing use of locally produced building materials and furnishings, provided natural daylight to nearly all of the occupied space, commissioned art for the guest rooms from local artists and provided adjacent temporary studio space for them, and even restored 700 feet of a stream on the property. Altogether, the design and construction of the hotel used more than 70 different sustainable practices.

The Proximity Hotel's sustainable design cost less than $7,000 more to build than using conventional design and construction techniques. In its first year of operation, it saved more that $13,000 on water use alone. One hundred solar panels heat the water for bathing and dish-washing in place of a conventional gas or electric water heater. The hotel that cost a little more to build wound up saving much more back in reduced operating costs. Green. Profitable.

A modest proposal for a better economic and environmental future

We love to play the blame game in this country, don't we? In any crisis or disaster, we can count on finger pointing. Various people will blame big business, big labor, immigrants, Republicans, Democrats, the President, Congress, the Supreme Court, liberals, conservatives, and so it goes on forever.

Unfortunately, folks engaged in blaming or trying to duck blame cannot expend that same energy on actually solving the problem. It was for Earth Day 1971 that Walt Kelly introduced perhaps the most famous line in his strip Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us." (See last week's strip for two examples.)

We all, as individual citizens, need to make adjustments in our lifestyle. We need to change our thinking, primarily because that's the only way we can change our behavior. I offer the following points for contemplation:

• It is not the government's responsibility to supply all our needs.
• But it is the government's responsibility to encourage development of more sustainable technologies. That means it must subsidize small startup companies until they and the industries they are founding become big enough to stand on their own.
• Not all tax increases are unreasonable burdens. People must be willing to pay the ones that support new technologies or upgrade our infrastructure.
• Bad things always happen, from natural disasters to man-made disasters. There's no point in merely trying to find who to blame for them.
• We have some control over some bad things, but none at all over others.
• Individuals ought to take prudent steps to insulate themselves from what can't be controlled. For example, your property floods regularly, move your residence or business somewhere else. Don't buy or build anything in such a place.
• Individuals and society as a whole must take control where we have the chance. Finger pointing and political name calling do not count.
• Maybe there's a better way to do things than the most immediately convenient way.
• Sustainable products and practices might be more expensive at first (not necessarily), but will actually cost less in the long run.
• Regardless of what anyone thinks about the necessity of oil exploration and drilling right now, we need to explore ways not to use oil for fuel at all. It may be impossible to stop all uses of petroleum products, but the less of it we use, the less we have to buy from unfriendly nations.
• It's not that hard to plan the order of errands to minimize how far you drive.
• The more we can use our own muscle power instead of some machine, the better it will be both for our health and the national energy consumption.
• Conservation and conservative come from the same root, but it is really something that everyone can practice, regardless of politics.
• Lately, the party in power has tried to run roughshod over the minority party. When the majority changes hands, the new majority effortlessly takes up where the old one left off. The only reason they get away with it is that voters let them. It's when your party is in the majority that you must push bipartisanship on them.
• Both the "left" and the "right" support, and are supported by, special interests. Lobbyist-driven legislation is probably bad for everyone else, so be careful what bandwagons you jump on.
• When you finish drinking something out of a can or bottle in your car, put it on the floor. You can put it in a trash can or recycling container when you get to a stopping place. Don't just throw it out the window. In other words, don't be part of the problem.

Are we prepared? Man-made and natural threats in the environment.

Astronomers predict an increase in solar activity that will at best interrupt our electrical and electronic infrastructure in the coming years. Is America ready? Does anyone really need to follow the link to know the answer? As a society, and for that matter, the human race as a whole, we are not very good boy scouts. We are hardly prepared for anything.

As I write this, the great BP oil spill continues to gush. BP was not prepared, but all of the other oil drillers had similar plans to deal with a deep-water emergency. They would not have been prepared, either.

The federal government proved unprepared to do much more substantial than to hold BP responsible and declare that they must pay. Not only has it done little to protect the coastline, it has actively interfered with local residents and governments in their attempts to deal with the problem.

Who elected such a government? The same folks who consistently build and rebuild homes and businesses in flood plains, earthquake fault zones, and unstable hillsides. The same folks who want every imaginable government service but don't want to pay taxes for them. The same folks who make their own convenience their very top priority, without questioning its costs.

Are we prepared for earthquakes? California, of necessity, has adopted strict building codes, and yet it's not that long ago that an earthquake collapsed an apartment complex, which caused many deaths. Geologists say that large earthquakes are likely in areas that experience them infrequently. What kinds of building codes do jurisdictions in those areas have?

Are we prepared for floods? We have built over wetlands that would have offered some protection from floods. We have constructed whole communities in flood plains. Property owners expect insurance companies to pay for rebuilding in the same place.

We never seem to have the money to prioritize replacing eroded bridges, redesigning highways with high accident rates, or otherwise keep infrastructure in good shape.

We keep discarding huge quantities of trash, even though some jurisdictions must now haul it many miles to find a landfill for it. Then, of course, the trucks must drive back empty--one way among many that we waste gasoline. Hmm. Might that have something to do with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?

Our oil addiction: just how serious is it?

I wrote earlier about our addiction to oil simply from the standpoint of energy usage. I would personally like to see a day when we don't use oil, or any other fossil fuel, for energy at all.

That will at least require massive changes in infrastructure and probably in the tax code. Those changes, in turn, will require a more cooperative, more compromise-prone politics than we have seen for decades.

Of course, we do more with oil than burn it for fuel. We are also  heavily dependent on petrochemicals. Some 93% of plastics manufactured in the US start with either oil or natural gas.

And how can we live without plastic? It's in everything. Sometimes plastic is a superior material to whatever it replaced. Sometimes there is not yet any conceivable replacement for plastic.

Kevin Swift of the American Chemistry Council has pointed out that a simple bottle of shampoo demonstrates how pervasive petrochemicals have become:

• The shampoo itself contains almost no natural ingredients at all; nearly all of them are petrochemicals.
• The bottle is plastic.
• The cap is a different kind of plastic.
• The seal, the label, the ink on the label, and the glue that holds the label on the bottle all come from oil or gas.

That's just one product. All of these petrochemicals have the same financial and geopolitical costs as the oil we use for fuel. They have their own environmental and health costs (and benefits, I must add).

It will probably never be possible to eliminate the use of petrochemicals entirely, even if we do succeed in completely swearing off using oil as a fuel. What we can and must do is understand the environmental and health consequences of petrochemicals and learn more sustainable ways of producing and using them.

Water resources and water usage: have we hit peak water?

In the familiar debate over the future of oil exploration, peak oil means the point at which extraction of oil has reached its maximum. At that point, remaining deposits become increasingly inaccessible, and so extraction rates must decline. Life after peak oil is usually described as some kind of doom and gloom scenario. Now, it seems, the US hit peak water in 1970 and nobody noticed.

Take away the overheated rhetoric, and the concept of peaking is a useful tool in planning for the use of any finite resource. But how does it apply to the earth's water supply? Isn't that a renewable resource? Yes, but it can reach limits on how humans can use it.

A river would seem to be a renewable resource, constantly replenished by rain and snow melt. But so much water gets taken from the Colorado River that there hasn't been enough for any to reach the ocean for about half a century. Underground aquifers would also seem renewable, but several, including the Central Valley Aquifer in California, are being drained faster than nature can recharge them.

Is that more doom and gloom? Not if we reached it this country more than a generation ago and researchers are only now figuring it out. Water use statistics are fragmented and difficult to interpret, but researchers at the Pacific Institute have suggested that water usage and the GDP grew at about the same rate until about 1970. After that, water use declined somewhat and then stabilized even though both the GDP and the population have continued to increase.

It appears, therefore, that economic and population growth do not automatically require growth in the use of resources. It further appears that finding ways to use resources more efficiently can be relatively painless.

There is, of course, a big difference between oil and water. Oil is not renewable in any way. Eventually, we will have to stop using it--and the sooner the better. Multiple technologies exist to derive energy from other, renewable sources.

Before we can stop using oil, we have to find a stable and sustainable way of using what's left. It doesn't have to be painful. I, for one, find an excess of political rhetoric and lobbying much more troubling than any shortage of oil.

The cost of convenience in trash collection

I'm dating myself here, but as child growing up in the late 1950s, I remember my mother carefully wrapping the garbage (food wastes) in newspapers every night and putting them in the garbage can by the garage. A company emptied it every week. Boy did it stink!

We put trash (bottles, cans, excess wire coat hangers, broken toys, and the like) in a different can by the garage, and a different company hauled it off. We did not throw out pop bottles; we had to pay a deposit on them, so we returned the empties to the store. As for waste paper, it was my job to empty the waste baskets from time to time into an incinerator and watch over it while it burned.

I suppose that was common all over the country. In 1961, Sam Yorty became mayor of Los Angeles. As part of his campaign, he promised to eliminate the necessity of separating wet and dry garbage. Actually, since the county had banned backyard incineration in 1957, citizens of Los Angeles had to deal with three different collections.

Of course, I have no recollection of Yorty; I grew up in Ohio. Somehow, though, the idea of a single collection of all refuse became the national norm. At some point, my home town also banned backyard incineration. I recall how strange it felt to mingle waste paper, cans, and food waste in the same trash can.

Ironically, the environmental movement began before the end of the decade. After the first Earth Day, in 1970, recycling became a mainstream idea, but not yet a mainstream practice. Perhaps older people recalled recycling and conservation as Depression and wartime necessities and resisted doing it again. Certainly younger people, having recently been freed from the necessity of separating garbage, did not want to have to do it again.

The practice of recycling would probably have caught on faster than it did if everyone were still in the habit of discarding wet and dry garbage into different collection receptacles.

If the practice of separation had continued, it would have been possible to compost the wet garbage. As it is, the commingling of wet and dry garbage limits waste disposal options. In the US, most waste eventually winds up in landfills.

There are two huge problems with landfills. They consume almost 3,500 acres of land per year. As landfills reach capacity, it is increasingly difficult to find land for new ones. Geologically, only certain sites are suitable. And of course, no one wants a new landfill built nearby.

Environmental hazards of landfills vary with their design and management. Problems at older or poorly managed landfills include foul smell, wind-blown litter, vermin, and the generation of a toxic liquid known as leachate.

To prevent those problems, newer designs call for a clay or plastic liner to contain the leachate and keep it from contaminating ground water. Each day's accumulation of new garbage must be covered to keep it in place and to avoid attracting vermin.

As a consequence, the landfill smells better, but the garbage decomposes much more slowly. And so the landfill reaches capacity more quickly. In addition, landfills produce methane and other greenhouse gasses.

I'm a musician and librarian. I do not claim to be an expert on waste management. But I can't help thinking that if Americans had had an uninterrupted practice of separating solid wastes, we would be composting the wet garbage. Recycling would be easier and would remove more from the waste stream than it currently does.

And above all, disposal non-recyclable dry waste would not produce so much gas and leachate byproducts. As a consequence, its disposal would be less environmentally hazardous, less expensive, and less controversial.

The cost of convenience at the grocery store

It used to be that preparing meals for a family took a woman most of the day, especially back when she had to raise and slaughter whatever animals provided meat and grow her own produce.

Nowadays, we can buy, say, lasagna from the freezer section of the grocery store, bread from the deli section, and a bag or two of salad from the produce section. That can provide a complete meal for a family with practically no effort. As a percentage of the family's income, it probably costs less than our great grandparents paid for one of their meals.

What is the real cost of this convenience? Let me count the ways:

1. The energy costs of manufacturing, packaging, and distributing the food, not to mention hauling the used packaging away from the house, contribute to each person's carbon footprint. We have not yet devised any method of manufacturing, transportation, or waste management that does not result in some kind of pollution. We import too much of our energy, most from nations that are not our friends.

2. The manufacturer of the lasagna has spent a great deal of money to determine how to make the tastiest product it can with the lowest cost. There's nothing wrong with trying to provide good value and get repeat business. Unfortunately, the lasagna, along with all other prepared meals, gives its pleasure through layers of fat, sugar, and salt. The human body easily becomes addicted to the accumulation of these ingredients, resulting in our current obesity epidemic, with all its consequences for people's health.

3. The whole meal probably came from miles away. In addition to the transportation costs, the distance has an accountability cost. Remember when packaged spinach was recalled? Carelessness at one farm resulted in contaminated spinach. That spinach was mixed together with spinach from other farms and distributed all over the country. Some of the packages contained toxins from the contamination. Most probably did not. And yet all of it had to be recalled. There was no economical way to determine which few packages were not fit to sell.

More could be said, but this is enough for one post. Do I mean we have to give up all our conveniences? No. I'd rather cook my own lasagna than buy it from the freezer section, but I certainly like having packaged mixed greens available. I wouldn't eat multiple kinds of lettuce fast enough to keep from throwing most of it out.

Meanwhile, I do believe that if more people cooked their own lasagna and/or clamored for real food, the kind you actually have to chew, restaurants and manufacturers would be happy to supply more wholesome and less addictive products. After all, if people stop buying addictive food that makes them unfit and unhealthy, manufacturers will have no choice but to start making what customers will want.

It would be nice if more things could be grown, packaged, and distributed locally. A bad batch of something would not require destruction of the good with the bad over half the country.

Does convenience have to cost so much? Can we find a way to get the costs under control? Are "efficiencies of scale" really all that efficient?

The cost of convenience: drive-throughs

For as long as I recall, and probably generations earlier than that, advertisers have promised that their products will save time. We all know how that turned out. Gas or electric stoves and ovens, refrigerators, washing machines and driers, other major appliances, and a host of other smaller gadgets saved housewives so much time that they can get jobs outside the home. And they have to in order to pay for all the stuff.

Once, everyone had their own garden, and most people kept chickens and other animals for their food. They had to chop wood to cook it. Then we got grocery stores to supply basic ingredients and utilities to provide cleaner and easier fuel.

Eventually, we got fast food companies, because folks have become too busy to cook even in their modern, convenient kitchens. Next came drive-through windows so no one even has to get out of the car to get the food.

What does all this convenience cost? In no particular order, we have fuel costs, land use costs, and health costs. There are pollution costs, too, but I will need to mention them in more than one place within these three.

Fuel costs

Firewood cost energy: energy to chop down trees, to cut them into logs , to transport the logs, to chop them into firewood, to carry the firewood to the kitchen, and to dispose of the ashes. The muscles of humans or working animals accomplished all of these tasks. Like the trees themselves, the energy was renewable.

I wouldn't want to have to go back to those days, and hardly anyone else does, either. Public utilities have proved a boon to everyone, but they are expensive. Besides what everyone has to pay in their monthly bills, there are environmental costs. Electricity generation depends largely on coal, a dirty fuel that in various ways pollutes air, water, and land.

We also have automobiles and trucks that mostly run on petroleum products. Unlike coal, the United States cannot produce all of the petroleum it uses. So besides the pollution costs of burning gasoline or diesel fuel we have the economic costs of importing petroleum and the geopolitical costs of having to buy it from our ideological adversaries.

Now imagine a line at a drive-through. The one at a Biscuitville near my house sometimes extends out into the street, causing traffic problems. Think of how much gas each car uses in inching all the way around the building until they receive and pay for their order!

Land use costs

One big problem with the old reliance on firewood has been solved: the accumulated ash is no longer the most bulky waste taken to the dump (or later, landfill). Fast food places alone account for a lot of paper, plastic, and food wastes that have to go somewhere--too much of it strewn along highways or in peoples' yards.

The fast food restaurants themselves require land both for the stores and parking lots. While they are often welcome additions to the communities in which they are built, they not infrequently touch off controversies over zoning. The large chains that own many of them regularly update individual stores, sometimes demolishing them to rebuild larger buildings or move to another lot.

All that construction rubble has to go to the landfill. The English idiom to throw something away disguises the fact that there is no such place as "away." We are running out of suitable sites for new landfills. No one exactly clamors to have one built near their homes.

That became particularly necessary when drive-through lanes first became popular. They put constraints on the design of the store's interior. They also require more land. After all, the store cannot sacrifice too many parking places for the drive-through.

Health costs

What is the current obesity epidemic besides a cost of convenience? We don't expend physical effort on food preparation when we eat at a fast food place. The food is designed to be easy to eat. It tastes good and doesn't require nearly as much chewing as "slow" food.

It is also loaded sale, fat, and sugar. A single fast-food meal may have half a day's allotment of calories and salt. That doesn't mean it satisfies our hunger. If it fills us up initially (not guaranteed), it does not keep us full for long. Most of us eat too much and exercise too little.

Even parking the car, going inside, and standing in line requires more of our own energy than sitting in it and burning up gasoline instead. Some people can walk to a fast-food place from their homes or hotel rooms. Do they? But many stores sit on pedestrian-unfriendly land.

Now that our culture has begun to take a fresh look at health, food, exercise, and sustainability, it is time to take a careful look at the conveniences in our lives. Have they become too expensive? And shouldn't we at least give up the drive-through window and walk into the store for our take-out food?

Saving the planet and our health at the same time

In a previous post, I pointed out similarities between the obesity epidemic and our addiction to oil. As we burn more oil, our air becomes less healthy. We cannot produce enough ourselves and have to buy it from countries that are not our friends. That, in turn, leads to uncomfortable consequences in foreign policy. The situation has lately become worse worldwide as developing nations try to catch up with our standard of living.

In this post, I want to concentrate more on the personal health side of the analogy. People become overweight by consuming more energy (calories) than they use for their daily activities. This weight puts stress on their joints and other body systems. It becomes more difficult to keep active. Less physical activity means burning even fewer calories and so gaining more weight. It's a vicious cycle.

If I drive where I used to walk, I not only use fewer calories but more oil. Likewise if I take an elevator or escalator where I used to take the stairs. As I expend less of my own body's energy, it gets heavier if I don't reduce what I eat.

But if I get to the place where it takes too much effort to go much of anywhere or do much of anything--if I spend more time just sitting because it hurts to do much more--I'm more likely to eat just to stave off boredom.

What kind of food can I eat without preparing a meal? I can toss something in the microwave. I don't know how to compare how much energy it takes to use the freezer and microwave for it with using the stove or oven to fix something comparable from scratch, but I suspect there's a net increase based on what it takes to get that prepared meal to your freezer.

First of all, the factory that manufactures the meal surely does not have people with knives and cutting boards preparing the ingredients. Making, say, stir fry on an industrial scale calls for fairly large machines to do any of the steps people would do in their own houses: cutting the ingredients, adding them to the wok, stir frying them, putting rice and water in a separate pot, and then serving up portions of an appropriate size.

Not only must machines do the work of people in a factory, but other machines must prepare various aspects of the packaging. Finished and packaged meals must be stored in a freezer at the factory. The factory then ships them to a warehouse, and the warehouse to the factory.

Freezers at the warehouse, at least two trucks, and the back room at the grocery store keep the meals frozen until they are ready to be placed on the sales floor. All those machines, trucks, and freezers use a tremendous amount of energy. I haven't even begun to describe the energy costs of manufacturing and shipping all of that packaging from raw materials to the landfill.

Obese people did not become obese over night. Our nation did not get into its dangerous addiction to oil over night, either. As I have tried to show, these two problems are not separate from each other.

Fortunately, whatever we do for our personal health will probably help the nation's energy imbalance. Take a look at other articles I have written, following the links to the left of this post.

We may think that one person can't do very much about large problems. But in fact, one individual making healthier choices, multiplied by tens of millions of other individuals making similar choices, can have a profound impact. That, after all, is how we got to where we are in the first place.

On stimulating innovation in green energy

The quest for green energy seems strongly bound to the politics of global warming and climate change. I find that unfortunate.

The earth's climate has gotten warmer over the past two centuries. Abundant evidence exists, from scientific measurements to the visual impact of melting polar ice and receding glaciers. Where people can honestly disagree is to what extent human activity has caused it and whether a catastrophe awaits the entire human race if we don't fix it.

My reading indicates that the present climate change follows a long-established natural rhythm, that industrial activity has contributed only marginally to it, that suddenly going back to pre-industrial energy use would not stop it, and that it does not threaten a global catastrophe. We need green energy for other reasons. Those who think otherwise generally follow two basic strategies for dealing with it.

Many want to deal with the problem through collective, global action to reduce carbon emissions and give billions of dollars worth of clean technologies to developing countries. Others want to work on the national and local level to stimulate the market place to develop new and more efficient energy sources and of products and processes that require less of it.

Those of us who are skeptical about the prospect of a climate-induced disaster ought to make common cause with the second group, because, in fact, it doesn't matter who is right about climate. Our current energy usage cannot be sustained, especially as India and China struggle to catch up as industrial powers.

Global initiatives do not offer much hope. World leaders can agree on all kinds of high sounding theories, but not on actual mechanisms for working together. Then, when they leave the big, splashy conferences, like the recent one in Copenhagen, they cannot find a politically viable way of meeting their own targets.

Still, entrepreneurs and industry cannot by itself devise self-sustaining ways of green energy generation and usage. The federal government must be involved in the creation of a new energy model, with or without the cooperation of other countries. Making most efficient use of any foreseeable kind of green electricity, for example, will require massive investment in an upgraded power grid.

At some point, the government must regulate carbon emissions. It will have to find some way of calculating the cost of carbon emissions both in terms of their impact on pollution and the implications for energy independence. The kind of extensive infrastructure upgrades that we need require funding from some kind of carbon tax.

Development of renewable, minimally polluting, efficient energy sources that do not depend on imports is certainly worth the creation of a new tax. Green energy legislation will open the door to innovation, therefore startups of entirely new companies, and therefore the creation of jobs that cannot exist under current conditions.

Record snow fall and climate change

Climate change? February 2010 has been one for the record books. Washington D. C. and the Mid-Atlantic states suffered monster blizzards on consecutive weekends that dumped five feet of snow. For a while, 49 of 50 states had snow on the ground. While no one has kept records, that certainly seems most unusual. Lot's of people say they would love to know where all that "global warming" is.

Jokes aside, and politics aside, climate and weather are not the same thing. The weather changes from day to day. Over a period of decades, any given day has its normal temperature, but the actual temperature may be twenty degrees higher or lower than normal. Climate does not vary from day to day. Climate change occurs more slowly and over a much longer time than weather.

In recent years, we have seen glaciers retreating. We have seen a lessening of ice at both poles. We have seen plant and animal life disappear from where we have been used to seeing it and appear somewhere else where it has never been before. The Northwest Passage, which Henry Hudson sought in vain in the frozen Arctic Ocean four hundred years ago, has become a reality, at least part of the year.

No one who bothers to differentiate between climate and weather can deny that the earth is becoming warmer. As we look back at climate changes over the last few thousand years, we can see that it has always fluctuated. Whatever legitimate controversy there is centers on whether today's climate change represents a continuation of age-old patterns or whether modern industrial technology has caused or contributed to it.

Those who, for scientific or political reasons, believe that climate change is at least partly man-made advocate making some wrenching changes in our industry. Others, for scientific or political reasons, hotly deny that human activity contributes to climate change.

In fact, it doesn't really matter who's right about that argument.

You read right. It doesn't matter whether human activity has caused climate change or not. We simply cannot sustain our current energy sources, energy usage, agriculture, transportation, solid waste, and much more--regardless of whether it's changing the climate or not.

Economic and geopolitical considerations--not to mention simple self interest--will eventually either dictate making changes or cause some kind of social collapse. Generally speaking, whatever changes man-made climate change may dictate need to happen for other reasons as well. Let's stop confusing climate with weather and figure out how to deal with the challenges that confront us

Oil: an unsustainable addiction

"America is addicted to oil," said George W. Bush. That was a startling admission from a President who used to be in the oil business. Another oil man, T. Boone Pickens, launched a plan for energy independence that involves substituting wind power for natural gas to generate electricity and using natural gas instead of oil to run our cars.

We are indeed in the midst of an oil crisis on many fronts. In fact, Bush understated the problem. The entire world suffers from the same addiction. India and China, trying to catch up with the United States and Europe as industrial powers, are driving up the world-wide price of oil. As long as oil is the fuel of choice, it puts economic development, or even self-sufficiency, out of reach of poorer countries.

Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, has more money than it knows how to spend wisely, so it diligently exports the anti-technology, anti-modern Wahabi sect of Islam to other countries.

The influence of that sect directly discourages education (especially for girls and women) and economic development. Indirectly, it discourages jobs and the people who need them. Whether on the Arab street or among the starving masses all over Africa or anywhere else, discouragement and discontent lead to violence.

I have nothing to say about global warming or climate change. Polar ice caps are melting, and the Northwest Passage that Henry Hudson couldn't find is becoming a reality. As to the argument over how much modern industry contributes to it, it really doesn't matter.

We--not just Americans or Europeans, but everyone else as well--have ample other reasons to find less expensive and more equitable sources of energy. Most of the ones under discussion now also seem to be cleaner and less damaging to the air and groundwater.

Both economically, environmentally, and geopolitically, the world cannot sustain its current energy usage. I, for one, would welcome development of enough viable alternatives to oil that we could stop using it entirely, or at least use less than we can produce ourselves.

Sustainability and obesity: consequences of not living green

Sustainability means finding a balance of economic and social goals with ecological awareness in order to minimize damage to the environment. Obesity, the result of an extreme imbalance of high food intake and low physical activity, serves as a good metaphor for neglecting sustainability.

Addiction to food (obesity)

Last October, the World Heath Organization reported that more people now die worldwide from being overweight than hunger. Apparently, obesity results from more than super-sized fast food meals or receiving double portions at American sit-down restaurants. Now, people not just in the U.S. and Western Europe, but also in places like Mexico, India, and China wrestle with bulging waistlines.

The relationship between food and health is fairly simple. A certain amount of the right kinds of food fosters good health. Too little or too much food is unhealthy. Extreme overweight makes physical activity difficult, exacerbating the weight problem. The body, incapable of sustaining that weight, develops such problems as heart trouble and diabetes. Obese people can regain health, but it requires intense discipline both in eating much less and exercising much more.

With obesity as a metaphor, it is possible to identify other addictions we have, not as individuals, but as society at large. It will likewise require intense discipline to make progress. I might add that sweeping government mandates will do more harm than good. As The Biggest Loser indicates, tough trainers can keep contestants working, but can't make them motivated in the first place. No one has ever succeeded in losing weight simply because someone else insists.

Sustainability works from the efforts of individuals and businesses operating from their own motivation and values. As important as its involvement is, government has only a supporting role.

Addiction to oil

America, as President George W. Bush famously put it, is addicted to oil. Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, construction, and heating and cooling our buildings all require tremendous energy. Emerging economies, seeking the same lifestyle choices and comforts we enjoy, use more and more energy all the time. Some products, including many that people discard after a single use, require oil as a raw material as well as energy to run the plant.

Overuse of oil and other fossil fuels has effects comparable to obesity. Analogous to heart disease and diabetes, the planet suffers polluted air and water. It must also endure the economic and geopolitical problems caused by the fact that countries that use the most energy cannot supply it from their own resources. They must purchase it from other countries, more likely than not politically and diplomatically unstable. The world, and America with it, cannot sustain the current pattern of energy usage.

Addiction to material things

America is likewise addicted to stuff. The media carry stories with alarming regularity of pack rats whose homes become unlivable. Most people get rid of stuff they don't want any more, including large quantities of packaging material and  plastic bags. Planned, or even forced, obsolescence guarantees a tremendous volume of trash. Tons of irreparable and useless, but sometimes hazardous, items get discarded every year. We say that we throw them away, but in fact, there is no such place as "away." Whatever cannot be repurposed must eventually either be burned or buried. 

Waste disposal creates its own pollution problems. When a landfill fills up and closes, finding another suitable site is difficult--and not only because no one wants a new landfill moving close to them. Waste disposal therefore becomes increasingly expensive and contentious. We cannot sustain the current pattern of discarding unwanted stuff.

Sustainability

Sustainability is not a concept invented by a few left-wing kooks. It is a means by which everyone can make incremental changes that will have a huge impact with minimal social disruption. It does not require sweeping government mandates, although it does require some level of government involvement.

As American businesses find new ways of going green--make money by building, manufacturing, and packaging things using fewer resources, we will have less stuff to discard. As American businesses find ways to make money from renewable resources, ways of using less fuel and ways to make more fuel-efficient products, we will become less dependent on foreign oil. As American people become more sensitive to their own environmental impact and continue making greener choices, many different environmental problems will become less dangerous.

Otherwise, we are a society suffering from a kind of obesity: getting less and less healthy by continuing behaviors that have caused our condition.