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Archive for July, 2008

30 steps to a more sustainable you!

7-22-2008. A quarter of a year has gone by since I posted my Earth Day blog offering 22 suggestions to change your lifestyle

Have you made any changes in the last 3 months?

I’ll trust that you have, and in case you’ve done so well that you’ve incorporated ALL 22 suggestions into your daily routine, I have added 8 more in this post (following the original 22) to make it an even 30.

After going through the list please use the comments section to add to my list and/or to explain why you’ve done so well (or poorly) in the last 3 months.

From Earth Day post:
1. Buy a rain barrel. You can’t drink the collected water, but you can water your lawn and wash your car with it. You’ll save thousands of gallons per year in the process!
2. Turn off your TV!!! At least limit your TV watching!
3. Drive less. Walk, bike, skip, skate, and stroll, more. This way you can get some fresh air while running an errand, and you’ll feel (and look) better in the long run.
4. Use natural fertilizers on your lawn and garden. Harsh chemicals found in conventional fertilizers are bad for your lawn and all who play on it. Also, it harms our groundwater supply.
5. Replace old bulbs with CFL’s and/or LED’s.
Read the rest of this entry »

Does your home include a not-so-small cache of old cell phones, used-up computers, and maybe even an extra TV?  You are not alone.  The dark side of our digital age is our growing mountain of used electronics.

According to the EPA, used or unwanted electronics amounted to approximately 1.9 to 2.2 million tons of waste in 2005.  Of that, about 1.5 to 1.9 million tons were primarily discarded in landfills, and only 345,000 to 379,000 tons were recycled.

But not only is this a huge amount of trash, but electronics contain many hazardous chemicals that need to be disposed of properly. Computer monitors and older TV picture tubes contain an average of four pounds of lead and require special handling at the end of their lives.  Even newer tubes can contain two pounds of lead.  Mercury is used in small amount in bulbs to light flat panel computer monitors and notebooks.  Cadmium was widely used in ni-cad rechargeable batteries for laptops and other portables. Older electronics contain brominated flame retardants, which were widely used in plastic cases and cables.  Simply tossing these items into the trash creates a major hazardous waste problem.  To learn more about the magnitue and danger of our electronics waste problem, watch this great video from Good Magazine on e-Waste.

What can you do with your e-waste?

Re-use is the most sustainable option.  If your electronics are in working order, or can be fixed, please consider donating them so they can be re-used.  Donating used electronics for re-use extends the lives of valuable products and keeps them out of the waste stream for a longer period of time.  When you donate your used electronics, you allow schools, nonprofit organizations, and lower-income families to obtain equipment that they otherwise could not afford.

There are a number of organizations you can explore for donating your electronics, including:

Computer for Schools: The Computers for Schools Program welcomes contribution of quality computer equipment and support dollars to accomplish their refurbishing work from donors across the nation.
The National Christina Foundation: A not-for-profit foundation dedicated to the support of training through donated technology. For more than two decades we have encouraged companies and individuals to donate computers and other technology, which is then matched to charities, schools and public agencies in all 50 states.
Collective Good: A mobile devices recycling resource. If you have spare mobile phones, pagers or PDAs sitting on a shelf or in a drawer, you can recycle them here in an environmentally and socially responsible manner.
Click here to learn about more electronics donation resources, from Earth911.org.

If your electronics are non-functional, then look to recycle them. This form of electronics recycling actually has its own name: e-cycling.  You will need to take your electronics to a special place where they can be handled properly. 

Here at Low Impact Living we have developed a deep, nationwide database of electronics recycling outlets: please click here to find an electronics recycling location near you.  

If you do not find one near you in our database, you might also try searching on the site hosted by the Electronics Industries Alliance. Click here to visit the EIA e-cycling resources map.

Related posts:

Recycle to the Max in Your City 
How to Recycle Your Used Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs
Recycling Saves a Ton of Energy, Too
Recycling? Starbucks? Hello?

Solar power means more than solar panels. These days it can also mean collectors, towers, dyes, oh my! Here’s a guide to (most of) the different kinds of solar technologies that are out there today.

First, the basics: Anything that uses solar energy as a source of power is solar-powered. Simple, right? Well let’s not forget that the sun gives us more than a whole spectrum of light, it also gives us heat. Both are used for a wide variety of applications, not just electricity.

Solar Thermal

Solar thermal technologies use heat. Cleantechnica has already introduced solar thermal. The cheapest, easiest, and most financially sound solar investment you can make for a house is to install a solar thermal collector. It collects solar energy to provide warm water or warm air for your house, even in the far north. On a larger scale, mirrors can be used to focus heat from the sun to boil water and turn a turbine. Generating electricity with this method is called Concentrated Solar Power (CSP). Large scale CSP projects are already underway in deserts around the globe, and in some places they are invigorating the economy.

The cool thing about CSP is that it overcomes one of the major problems with renewable energy. It used to be true that solar farms stopped producing energy as soon as the sun went down. No longer. Heat is much easier and cheaper to store than electricity, so you can save it for the hours or days when the sun doesn’t shine. Power towers and molten salt are just two methods of producing solar power whenever we need it. Read the rest of this entry »

Today we are joined by guest writer by Julie Craves, who is the force behind Coffee & Conservation.  Coffee and Conservation is a wonderful site devoted to educating all of us about the connection between coffee and the environment. Julie Craves is a University of Michigan bird ecologist and coffee lover. Her research focuses on migratory birds in North America, and she has traveled to several coffee-producing countries and visited a number of coffee farms. Thank you for sharing your insights, Julie!

Coffee is grown in over 60 tropical countries, with most of it still produced on small family farms, but adding up to tens of millions of acres. In the last decade, a huge worldwide surge in demand for coffee has had two profound consequences.  It caused a rapid worldwide expansion in production, largely of cheap beans that flooded the market and contributed to plummeting wholesale prices. And in the rush to increase production, it caused a shift from traditional, sustainable coffee growing methods (with coffee plants grown in the shade of diverse native trees) to intense monocultures that require large inputs of fertilizer and pesticides which bring about a loss in biodiversity and quickly deplete the land.

Coffee is the second largest U.S. import after oil. Coffee drinkers have the potential to make a huge impact on the environment and economies of coffee growing nations. If we understand the stakes, we can make a significant difference, and enjoy our favorite beverage at the same time!

The Top 5 Indicators for Finding Sustainable Coffee

1. Certification. Because of the costs of certification — to the farmer and/or the roaster — not all sustainable coffees necessarily carry a seal. And if they do, it could be one of several.

BIRD-FRIENDLY is certified by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, and it is grown under the most stringent environmental standards of any certification system. It is also required to be certified organic.

ORGANIC certification is an important indication that many (but not necessarily all) chemical inputs have been eliminated or reduced.

RAINFOREST ALLIANCE also has environmental criteria, although organic certification is not required, and a coffee may carry the seal and only contain 30% certified beans. Beware that some of the large commodity coffee providers (such as Kraft, which markets Yuban coffee) use the Rainforest Alliance seal, but only purchase a tiny fraction of their supply from sustainable sources.

2. Country of origin. Some countries still grow much of their coffee under shade, preserving native forest and biodiversity and using few if any chemicals. Other countries have removed shade trees or cut down areas of native forest and planted sun-tolerant coffee varieties. Countries most likely to grow under shade are El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Papua New Guinea. These countries are more likely to grow coffee in deforested, full sun farms, so use a lot of caution: Costa Rica, Brazil, Colombia, Vietnam.

3. Botanical variety. There are two species of coffee used commercially: Coffea arabica or arabica coffee, and Coffea canephora, or robusta coffee. Arabica is high quality. Robusta coffee is nearly always low quality, mass produced in deforested sun coffee monocultures with lots of chemicals, and is used in most supermarket coffees. You won’t see “robusta” on the label, so look for “100% arabica.”

4. Roaster. Buy coffee from a small, specialty roaster. A good roaster develops a relationship with the farms and co-ops that grow their coffee — it’s in everybody’s best interest for the coffee to be grown sustainably. The farmer gains by having a reliable buyer and a safe, healthy environment, and the roaster gains by having a reliable source of quality coffee. A conscientious roaster will have very specific information on the precise origin of each coffee it sells, and you can determine how the coffee was grown to guide your purchase. You can find a list of recommended roasters both in the page footer of Coffee & Conservation, or at the Coffee & Conservation Interactive Roaster Map.

5. Price. This is nearly a given: cheap coffee is not sustainable. Not for the farmer, not for the environment. People who are used to paying less than $5 a pound for grocery store coffee shudder at the idea of paying $10 or more for a pound of coffee from a specialty roaster. Ounce for ounce, it’s still cheaper than a good bottle of wine or scotch or many other beverages. You can calculate how much a cup of coffee costs from any given bag you purchase in this worksheet.

Learn more!

What is shade grown coffee?

There is no legal definition of “shade grown” and some companies play fast and loose with this designation.

Problems with “sun” coffee

Coffee naturally occurs in forests, but there has been a recent trend to “modernize” production by planting it in deforested monocultures.

Why birds need shade coffee farms

What’s so important about growing coffee in the shade, anyway?

More background on sustainable coffee

Here are more links to help you understand the basics of sustainable coffee.

As ethanol from corn comes under fire due to rising corn prices, attention is turning to other ethanol sources. Plans are in the works to build a plant in northwest Indiana which would make ethanol from municipal waste. Approval of the plant was announced by the Lake County Solid Waste Management Board in January 2007.

And Chicago’s WBEZ reported this week that Indiana Ethanol Power is now ready to go with its plan. The technology, developed by James Titmas at GeneSyst, would produce 20 million gallons of fuel-grade ethanol and other products each year.

According to Biofuels Digest, several cities, including New York, NY and Bridgeton, NJ, are on the verge of implementing such plants. Diverting municipal waste from landfills to make fuel-grade ethanol sounds like a win-win for everyone. And locating ethanol refineries near cities makes sense, because that’s where the mounds of garbage are. So what’s the holdup in Indiana? According to Indiana Ethanol Power’s Zig Resiak:

“Municipalities are very comfortable with putting it in the back of a truck and letting it go into a landfill. They don’t think about it twice. But for us to come in and say we’re going to take it cheaper and save you millions of dollars a year on your tipping fee, that’s different and that’s kind of scary, and they want to take a good, strong look at that.”

Sounds like a leadership vacuum. We hope that Indiana and Illinois (and Chicago and Gary) can get it together and follow the example of Edmonton, CA which just signed an agreement to begin production. The plant will initially produce 36 million litres of biofuels per year and reduce Alberta’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by more than 6 million tons over the next 25 years, which is the equivalent of removing 12,000 cars from the road.

Related Posts:

New Carbon-Negative Community Loves their Waste

First Sustainable Ethanol to Mass Market?