You’ve probably seen those vaguely unsettling commercials with Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich or Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson sitting on a couch in some outdoor setting. Weird as those may be (and they sure work to get my attention), they represent a cool organization. The We Campaign is part of the Alliance for Climate Protection, a non-profit started by Al Gore. They’re trying to raise awareness about global warming and climate change, convincing people one at a time of the scientific truth of this issue. They’ve got some great tips about what you can do to minimize your personal impact.
While listening to NPR this morning, I heard a story on Pitzer College near Claremont, California. Pitzer is just putting the finishing touches on Gold LEED certified residence halls. They’ve got student-maintained organic gardens, low-flow showerheads, water-conserving toilets, solar panels, recycled building materials and more. And, they anticipate that this project will save the college money in the long-term. If a residence hall can do it, what an easy job a house would be. Sounds much better than the high-rise cement block housing I had in college.
I got my watering orientation today - I’m volunteering to water the plants at a local community center. And, in reading this True Green book that I mentioned yesterday, I found some interesting garden facts.
The book recommends planting native plants that are accustomed to the rainfall amount in your area. Growing native plants can save 50% of the water used to maintain outdoor plants (a sprinkler uses 264 gallons of water an hour). And when you’re planting those native plants, make sure to shade your air conditioner so it doesn’t have to work as hard. And for the water that those native plants do require, consider using a simple rain barrel. Collecting the rainwater that runs off the roof of a 2,000 sq ft home can yield as much as 36,000 gallons of rainwater per year. Make sure to put a cover around where the drain spout feeds into the barrel to prevent mosquitoes from using it as a nursery.
And the bit of advice that is most applicable to my volunteer watering: when to water. Watering during cooler times of the day not only prevents a wicked sunburn, it gives the water a chance to soak into the dirt and roots rather that quickly evaporating from the sun. In hot seasons, water in the evening. In cool seasons, water in the morning to prevent the fungal growth that could develop on wet leaves overnight.
I’m reading a new book called True Green, with lots of easy-to-read quick bits on things you can do to help the environment. Two of the tips center on showering and, since I tend to linger in the shower, it seemed like something I should pay attention to. According to the book, if I reduced my 10 minute showers to 5 minutes, I’d save 4,200 gallons of water per year and eliminate over 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions (produced by the hot water heater). Doing a little figuring of my own, reducing my daily 10 minute shower to 5 minutes would save approximately $3 per month or $36 per year. If both myself and my fella reduced our showers by 5 minutes, we’d save $72 per year. That’s just figuring the charge for the water itself, assuming a charge of $4.04 per 1,000 gallons and a standard showerhead, and doesn’t include the charge for the energy used to heat the water.
A standard showerhead uses 4 to 6 gallons of water per minute. A low flow showerhead can reduce that amount by 50% or more. According to the book, after a year of 5-minute showers, a family of 4 will save up to 20,000 gallons of water, plus the energy needed to run the hot water heater. This reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 300+ pounds per year. Low-flow showerheads range from $12 to $55 in price and can be found many places including Gaiam, Creative Energy Technologies, Oxygenics, and Amazon.
I recently stumbled across something that had never even crossed my mind: environmentally-friendly web hosting. Who knew? I don’t know why I never thought this might exist, since I design websites for a living - ya learn something new every day.
Affordable Internet Services Online powers their servers through a bank of solar panels. Their solar panel system prevents enough emissions to be the equivalent of planting 3.5 acres of trees per year. Their tagline is web hosting as nature intended, which cracks me up. I have images of giant redwood tree data storage and kudzu for connectivity.
Okay, just chips. I happened to stumble across a pleasantly surprising fact - Sun Chips, in addition to being super yummy, are also environmentally friendly. Their distribution center in Rochester, New York was granted LEED Gold Status, building standards which I’ve previously mentioned. Their chips have 18 grams of whole grain in each serving. They buy enough energy credits to offset 100% of the electricity needed to produce Sun Chips. So, consider these when you’re next buying chips and vote with your dollar.
Several months ago, I watched a really interesting documentary called Who Killed the Electric Car?. It followed the story of the EV1 in the 90’s, a car sold mostly in California that was recalled by GM and summarily destroyed.
Apparently, GM may be realizing it’s mistake because it launched the Volt at an auto show in Shanghai in April. According to the Marketplace report, it won’t be ready to go into production until the end of the decade, but at least they’re now moving in the right direction. Plus, the Volt can go 300 miles on a charge, rather than the 100 that the EV1 could go on a charge (if I’m remembering the documentary correctly).
Being nearly a conjoined twin to my computer, I’ve written previously about the energy consumption of computers. While it saves 67% of the yearly energy use to reduce computer use to 8 hours a day, there’s been more than one time that I thought I’d turned off my computer only to find that it was on all night asking if I wanted to save a document before it would shut down. Well, now Local Cooling has a cure for that. Local Cooling is a free application from Uniblue Labs that claims to reduce your computer’s power consumption. Actually, according to Treehugger, it just monitors your energy use by looking at the power options in the control panel, but it is fun to see how much you’ve saved by having your monitor switch off in 5 minutes instead of 10.
Another program that has more use than Local Cooling is GreenPrint. I also found out about this from Treehugger. This one isn’t free but does have a 30-day trial download version and may be worth it in the amount of paper and ink that you save (their site says that average user saves $90 per year, at $0.06 per sheet). It shows you the document before you print and allows you to remove any pages that you don’t need to print (the last 3 lines of a stupid signature file in emails, for instance). It also creates PDFs so that you don’t need to print to paper at all. This is a nice, cheap way to get the PDF writing benefits of the relatively expensive Adobe Acrobat, with their price of $35 stacking up nicely to the hundreds of dollars that Adobe costs. It’s Windows only, but OSX users have always been able to print right to PDF.
Numerous cities and electric cooperatives across the country are participating in the Energy Star Change a Light, Change the World campaign. According to the magazine put out by my local energy cooperative, 100 pledges to replace one incandescent light bulb (a ‘regular’ bulb) with an Energy Star light bulb (the cool spiral bulb) could save 28,200 kwh of energy and prevent 44,600 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions. Check out the current progress and see how your state is doing.
