eco-friendly living

Going for the Gold

jchatraw — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 02:33:49 -0400

As I was sitting on the couch last night watching Michael Phelps win another Olympic gold medal by beating a field of swimmers that looked so slow in comparison that maybe they were wearing floaties, my wife organized our cutlery drawer. The ensuing conversation went something like this:

Me: “Look, honey. Michael Phelps just won another gold medal! This dude is amazing!”

My wife: “Look, honey! I just organized all our forks and knives!”

I had goosebumps as Phelps took the stand for the national anthem; my wife expected me to place a medal around her neck for her monumental achievement as well.

Before you think I’m ripping on my wife, you have to understand that I equate physical feats of dominating the world in a certain sport with one’s ability to organize, particularly a cluttered drawer. Last night, my wife took gold, too--only her veins didn't bulge out of her neck as she celebrated, unlike Phelps.

So, how exactly does clearing out our clutter translate into eco-friendly living and a greener lifestyle? Janet Luhrs reminds us in “The Simple Living Guide: A Sourcebook for Less Stressful, More Joyful Living” that removing the clutter and keeping it out of our lives helps us avoid buying unnecessary items:

“’Equilibrium’ means that things are balanced. It applies to clutter in a big way. Once you complete your search-and-destroy mission in your house, keep things in equilibrium by never bringing in more than you take out. Take your hall closet, for example. After you have simplified and organized it, do not, I repeat, do not buy anything new in that department until you remove the same number of things as you plan to bring in. Why do you need another jacket or hat anyway? Think of each space (closets, shelves, drawers) as finite. Nothing else will fit in them. Period. If you take this rule to heart, it will stop you in your tracks before you go out and buy more stuff.”

For me, that means giving away clothes the next time I want to buy something new. For Phelps, it means removing those silver medals from the house to make room for the gold.

High Gas Prices Have You Feeling Low?

jchatraw — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 03:04:52 -0400

While ExxonMobil continues to set quarterly records through prices at the pump, most Americans are scrambling to figure out how to create a sustainable lifestyle that will weather an economy on the verge of a genuine recession. Though gas prices seem to be headed down for the moment, we should continue to develop sustainable lifestyles.

David Wann has some easy suggestions in his book, Simple Prosperity: Finding Real Wealth in a Sustainable Lifestyle. This book goes beyond suggestions about how to save money and lays out what a true sustainable lifestyle can look and feel like. It is one part idealistic and two parts practical. For Wann, heaping those ingredients into the pot of life produces one deliciously sustainable lifestyle.

Here are some of Wann’s interesting thoughts—and tips—about water and how to conserve it:

"While each American drinks a daily four to ten glasses of water and other beverages, the amount of water our food “drinks” in the fields and processing plants is more like 2,000 gallons a day. About an equal amount is used in the United States by the power industry to cool natural gas turbines as well as nuclear cooling towers. (In the broiling summer of 2006, nuclear plants in both the United States and Europe were forced to shut down because cooling water from ponds and rivers wasn’t cool enough to ensure safety.) So really, the best ways to conserve water are to pay attention to what we eat, and to use energy efficiently. It’s also very important to use water-efficient fixtures in the home, and landscaping that minimizes water use. The 100 gallons a day that we each use in our homes can easily be cut by a third to a half by substituting efficient conveyances—in the form of well-designed fixtures, showerheads, toilets, and aerators—for resources. The need for water will only get stronger, since the global populations continue to expand, but the amount of fresh water remains exactly the same."

Free Money to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

jchatraw — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 03:00:00 -0400

The city of Toronto has a program called "Live Green Toronto" that is offering citizens grants for ideas that would reduce their carbon footprint. It may take a while before any U.S. cities follow suit, but this great idea will help promote both awareness and action that should serve as a blueprint for other municipalities.

In the meantime, us non-Torontoans will settle for the ideas in Johanna Yarrow's book How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint: 365 Simple Ways to Save Energy, Resources, and Money.

The book looks at a number of different areas, some that are easy to do and some that are only accessible to those with deep pockets. Here are a few anyone can do from the section on "Buying Less":

"Eat before you shop for food. Studies show that this helps trim the amount you buy.

Think long term. Investing in high-quality durable goods is cheaper in the long run, and less wasteful than buying cheap, throwaway versions.

Buy services instead of products—such as leasing services for office equipment, so manufacturers will produce durable, updatable products, rather than ones that are obsolete in a few years.

Avoid disposables, which invariably have a high carbon impact. For example: cover food with a dish, plate or lid instead of foil or plastic wrap; use hand towels and dish towels instead of paper towels; and buy sturdy, reusable utensils and dishes for barbecues and picnics, instead of flimsy disposables."

Rethinking Laundry

jchatraw — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:20:37 -0400

When you're poor and live in the country, summers are filled with the endless chore of hanging clothes with clothespins on the line outside and retrieving them hours later. The monotony of such a task was broken only by the occasional protest my brother and I staged when our basket contained our little sister's panties. However, we usually lost as evidenced by the previously mentioned personal items of our little sister being hung by as little fabric as possible. Handling such clothing items would have surely given us cooties even a hundred unwanted baths couldn't have washed away.

Now, in my revisionist history, I tell others that my family was eco-friendly cool before it was cool. My mom and dad had the foresight to see what an energy-saving idea it was to dry your clothes on the clothesline outdoors in the summer.

Revisiting such traditions from my childhood isn't a fond thought, but it isn't the end of the world. In fact, it's one small step that just might keep us from getting to the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine).

In her book Easy Green Living: The Ultimate Guide to Simple, Eco-Friendly Choices for You and Your Home, Renee Loux makes sure readers are equipped to make hassle-free changes to their lives, including ways to have fresher, eco-brilliant laundry. Here are her tips on laundry:

Wash full loads to get the most out of water and energy use.
Rinse laundry with cold water. Eighty-five to 90 percent of the energy used to wash clothes goes to heat the water.
Use plant-based, biodegradable detergents that don’t have chemical fragrances or dyes.
Opt out of using chlorine bleach. Choose oxygen bleach instead—it’s color safe, fabric friendly, and eco-brilliant.
Line dry what you can. It saves energy and money and extends the life of your clothes.

How to Save Water ... and Money

jchatraw — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 02:01:10 -0400

In our house when I was growing up, The Cosby Show was must-see TV on Thursday nights before NBC's marketing execs ever dreamed up that tag line. It's where I learned such great life-long lessons like how to hold a proper funeral for a goldfish or how to mop ("shovel, turn, splat"). It's also where I learned a la Cliff Huxtable (played by the Cos himself) that if you're not good at fixing things, don't try--and call someone who is. Cliff always made a bigger mess of things.

However, over the years I've also learned that said handymen can be expensive--and that there are a few things even I can do. Despite all I know about fixing things could fit into one of Bob Villa's arm hair follicles, I managed to fix our bathroom ventilation a few months ago much to my loving wife's surprise.

When it comes to the living an eco-friendly lifestyle, there are a few things we can all easily fix or at least investigate to see if something even needs fixing ... like our toilets and faucets.

In Stu Campbell's classic The Home Water Supply (classic mostly because it even pre-dates The Cosby Show), he explains a few ways you can check to make sure you're not losing water at home:

"Leaks in a faucet can amount to a loss of twenty gallons a day. A runny toilet can lose 200 gallons a day! A dye tablet, free for the asking at health agencies nearly anywhere in California, can be dropped in a toilet tank to demonstrate, almost immediately, if there’s a leak. Over time the dye will detect even the slightest wasteful seep. Food coloring will do the same job. So will turning off the water supply line to the toilet tank and watching the water level inside for several hours.

"People in metered water systems have a quick and easy way to check for leaks. Make sure everything in the house is turned off, so the system theoretically is using no water. If the meter still shows some water input, water has to be leaking somewhere. In an individual water system, finding leaks becomes a more painful trial-and-error search."

50 Simple Things You Can to Save the Earth-- Updated

jchatraw — Fri, 16 May 2008 01:26:39 -0400

It's the hard part of being green that makes you really feel like you're making a difference. For example, my wife and I recently decided disposable diapers really weren't that disposable and made the transition to cloth diapers from Bum Genius. And while it's not nearly as time consuming or tedious as washing old-school cloth diapers like my mom did, it still takes more effort than a quick wrap and a dump into the diaper pail.

However, simple is good, too. So for all the difficult things I do to play my part in saving the earth as I resist the urge for convenience, it's still nice to know there are some simple things I can do as well that make just as much of a difference.

John, Sophie and Jessie Javna have updated their classic book 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth: Completely New and Updated for the 21st Century. And I have to admit that its simplistic approach to complex issues is the real beauty in this book.

Check out this green nugget as it pertains to saving the rivers in America and water conservation:

WHAT YOU CAN DO
Your Partner: American Rivers, a national organization that "protects and promotes our rivers as valuable assets that are vital to our health, safety, and quality of life." Meet them at americanrivers.org
Your Goal: Make using water wisely a focus of our society. "One of the challenges," explains American Rivers' Betsy Otto, "is that water-efficiency isn't sexy. People just don't perceive that we need to use water more wisely ... until we run out."

Start Simple
Start saving. American Rivers' "3 simple ways to save water": 1) Fix leaks. A faucet leak of 60 drops per minute wastes 192 gallons a month; outdoor leaks from hose connections and irrigation systems can lose 50% of the water used. 2) Install low-flow showerheads and faucet aerators, which can cut flow by 50%. 3) Turn the faucet off when you brush your teeth or shave. You'll easily save over 5 gallons each time. More tips: 50simplethings.com/savewater

Farewell My Subaru -- Living off the Land

jchatraw — Tue, 13 May 2008 01:24:23 -0400

At 23, Cleveland Cavaliers' superstar LeBron James can't even escape his mother's shadow, as he endured the embarrassment of having dear ole mom defend her son's honor courtside after a hard foul against the Boston Celtics in the playoffs. But for Doug Fine, escaping the shadow of his mother--and everything else--was easy enough: Move to New Mexico and live off the land on a ranch.

Fine's new book Farewell, My Subaru: An epic adventure in local living chronicles his choice to leave city life behind and leave the smallest footprint possible. The result is a light-hearted look into the mind of a regular guy who isn't ready to give up all the comforts of modern living--just simply have them powered by solar energy.

Here's a green nugget from Fine's truly fine book where he's talking about what happened when his car began drifting downhill:

"Epiphany in the desert Southwest is not subtle. Almost nothing in this stark, gorgeous ecosystem is. I moved several thousand miles from my place of birth in order to kick fossil fuels and live locally. Three days later, MY CAR WAS LITERALLY RUNNING AWAY FROM ME. This is how lessons are taught in a place where even sitting down means a possible impaling. I figured I would forge success from astonishing, seemingly irrevocable defeat, you know, like Al Gore.

"I didn’t need the message hammered home so literally. The time was absolutely right for me personally to embark on this adventure in living green—other than having no electrical, plumbing, building, engine mechanical, horticultural, or animal husbandry skills at all, that is. After growing up on Dominoes Pizza in the New York suburbs, at age thirty-six I wanted to see if a regular guy who enjoyed his comforts could maintain them with a reduced-oil footprint. In concrete terms, this meant raising animals and crops for my food, figuring out some way besides unleaded to get anywhere, and making bank account–draining investments in solar power.

"I’d lived and worked in extreme conditions on five continents since the beginning of my career as a journalist fifteen years ago, but time and again, after shivering in Alaska and dodging bullets in Tajikistan, I reaffirmed what I already knew: I like my Netflix, wireless e-mail, and booming subwoofers. In fact, I didn’t want to live without them. I just wanted to power them by the sun. If my ear- melting music could go solar, and still make my UN-fearing neighbors complain about bass lines interrupting their nightmares of Hillary Clinton, I’d consider this experiment a success.

Always Have a Backup Plan

jchatraw — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:00:00 -0400

While the No Impact Man knows how to shrink your green ego in a hurry, his ideas regarding refrigeration of food intrigued me. Using some primitive "technology" from Nigeria, he cools his food with giant pots, sand, and water. I know, it sounds crazy, but apparently it works.

After hearing about his adventures in green living in Manhattan, I stumbled upon Lester R. Brown's book, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. My thoughts on just what an energy consumer my refrigerator is were confirmed--along with many other suspicions I've had about the way my lifestyle was impacting the earth.

Check out this green nugget from Brown's "substantially revised" book:

Although attention commonly focuses on energy use on the farm, agriculture accounts for only one fifth of the energy used in the U.S. food system. Transport, processing, packaging, marketing, and kitchen preparation of food are responsible for the rest. The U.S. food economy uses as much energy as the entire economy of the United Kingdom.

The 14 percent of energy used in the food system to move goods from the farmer to consumer is equal to two thirds of the energy used to produce the food. And an estimated 16 percent of food system energy use is devoted to canning, freezing, and drying food—everything from frozen orange juice concentrate to canned peas. ...

The most energy-intensive segment of the food chain is the kitchen. Much more energy is used to refrigerate and prepare food in the home than is used to produce it in the first place. The big energy user in the food system is the kitchen refrigerator, not the farm tractor. While oil dominates the production end of the food system, electricity dominates the consumption end. With higher energy prices, the modern food system that evolved when oil was cheap will not survive as it is now structured.

From Green to Greenest

jchatraw — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

I'm sure we all have friends who just aren't quite there with the green lifestyle. Maybe just convincing them to recycle is like trying to persuade the Pope to become a protestant--it's a waste of your breath. Or maybe you have friends who have waded into the kiddie pool but aren't sure just how deep they want to go with this eco-lifestyle thing.

Well, here comes Lori Bongiorno's new book Green, Greener, Greenest: A practical guide to making eco-smart choices a part of your life to save the day. In the book, Bongiorno takes everyday products and consumer choices and shows you ways that you can be green, greener or greenest. It's non-threatening and isn't in the least bit condescending--definitely a breath of fresh air among some of the green brow beatings going on in the book realm. Everyone can feel good about taking a step forward and becoming more green.

Here's a green nugget from her book:

Most of us are aware of the dangers of overexposure to the sun, and it's pretty common knowledge that we need to seek out "broadspectrum" sunscreen—products that protect us from both the ultraviolet B (UVB) and ultraviolet A (UVA) radiation. However, a 2007 study by the Environmental Working Group says we may not be getting all the protection we need, even if we use sunscreens with high sun protection factor (SPF) ratings. That's not the only concerning news that came out of the EWG report. The bottom line: only 16 percent of the products on the market today are both safe and effective, meaning that they block both UVA and UVB radiation, remain stable in sunlight, and contain few if any ingredients with significant known or suspected health hazards. ...

Green
Use the best sunscreen to fit your needs. Because there are so many factors to consider when purchasing sunscreen and the stakes are high, the best thing you can do to find the safest and most effective products is to visit www.cosmeticsdatabase.com.

Greener
Don't rely only on sunscreen. Follow this advice from the American Cancer Society:
* Limit exposure to direct sunlight from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. when the sun's ultraviolet rays are most intense. The sun's rays are strongest if your shadow is shorter than you are. UV radiation can also pass through water and reflects off of sand and snow.
* Wear a hat with at least a two- to three-inch brim all around or shade caps, which look like baseball caps with a long piece of material draping down the sides and back. ...

Greenest
Urge the FDA, www.fda.gov, to set mandatory sunscreen safety standards, develop UVA standards, and approve new effective and safe sunscreens in the United States.

Is It Really Easy to be Green?

jchatraw — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:40:46 -0500

Being convinced we need to change the way we’re living in order to save the planet is one thing. But actually doing it? For most people it’s about as easy as waking up one morning and deciding to run a marathon … that day. While every celebrity is out convincing us that we need to save the environment, we need more than just the idea pounded into our heads.

In her book, It’s Easy Being Green: A Handbook for Earth-Friendly Living ($12.95, Gibbs Smith, 2006), author Crissy Trask does something remarkable: she convinces you it’s easy to change the way you live while showing you how.

Here’s a green nugget from her book:

“After doing something a certain way long enough, it becomes automatic, but just because something has become automatic doesn’t mean that replacing it will be difficult. Forming new eco-friendly behaviors is simply a process of time, repetition and growth. Even in areas where you may have deep-rooted habits, rethinking the full experience and implications of those habits can reveal how unsuitable they really are. Take our dependence on the automobile, for example: do we love asphalt landscapes, traffic jams, road rage, brown skylines and filling our tanks at the pump? Much of the driving people do is more of a habit than a convenience, pleasure or necessity. And like all habits we want to break, we need only find a new one to replace it. Reducing how many days we do the driving—and letting a carpool buddy or public transit worker pick up the slack—reduces stress, accidents and traffic as well as expenses for gas, insurance, tickets, parking and vehicle maintenance. Giving up your car two to three days a week when transportation alternatives exist isn’t a hardship, it’s just an adjustment.”

No brow beating here—just the honest truth about how to transition into being green, while making it sound easy and fun in the process.