Green Living
If you’re like me you’ve got a lot of broken stuff in your basement or attic or storage area. Thinking about my basement, I can picture the train table with a missing leg, some chairs with busted seats, and–oh year–an old laptop computer. I keep telling myself I’m going to have those chair re-caned and I’ll try to give the train table away to someone handier than me who would reattach the leg. But the laptop computer. It has never even crossed my mind that anyone–let alone me–could or would fix it. But we could.
First a little context: Ewaste is a devastating problem. According to National Geographic reporting, 80% of our used and broken electronics are landfilled in this country (this despite bans that seek to keep toxins from leaching into soil and water supplies). What about the 20% that is “recycled”? Well most of this gets shipped overseas where individuals are burning it–that’s right burning it–or ripping it apart in order to recover materials like copper that have a resale value. Meanwhile dangerous pollutants like flame retardants, arsenic and mercury are released into the air, water and soil. And how are the individuals conducting these “recycling” operations protecting themselves from exposure? They aren’t. And many of them are just kids.
There are solutions. On the legislative/regulatory side, we could and should require manufacturers to take responsibility for the end-life of their products. This would surely go a long way towards moving away from a conventional design practice called planned obselecense. Instead of designing products to become obsolete (motivating consumers to buy newer, better, faster products), such laws would incent manufacturers to design products that will last a long time and are easier to fix when they break and upgrade as new technology develops.
But even with better design, things will still break. Someone needs to fix them and most of us don’t have a clue to go about doing this. Enter solution number 2: Ifixit is an exciting young company that is working to create comprehensive online repair manuals for every electronic device and, thus, enable people to fix their broken down electronics. In a video on the company’s website, co-founder, Kyle Wiens, describes the effort as a “wikipedia-like” one. In other words, Ifixit is aiming to create a continually updated encyclopedia for repairing electronics. Not only that: they provide troubleshooting guides and sell parts and tools. Pretty exciting if you ask me.
If you want to learn more about the ewaste problem and how Ifixit is working to solve it, visit their website and make sure to watch the video. It’s devastating and inspiring at the same time–in my opinion, just the right combination to motivate change.
Watching West Coast cities push ahead with curbside food composting, I’ve been almost green with envy. Perhaps most highly publicized is San Francisco’s program, which began last year as part of the city’s ambitious goal to achieve net zero waste by 2020. Then there’s Seattle’s program, which has been running since 2005! And now Portland, OR has joined in with trial program that began last week.
Meanwhile, here in my home town of Newton, MA we are still struggling to adjust to single stream curbside recycling–as we continue to consign our apple cores, cucumber peels, egg shells and coffee grounds to the garbage disposal or trash bin. Which, by the way, accounts for a heck of a lot of trash: nationwide almost 30% of municipal solid waste nationwide is organic, compostable matter. And this figure doesn’t even take into account the amount of food we’re washing down the drain.
So what are those of us who aren’t blessed with curbside composting programs to do (besides agitating for them)? Well, we can start by setting up a home composting system.
My family has been composting now for almost three years and it’s really a lot easier to set up and maintain than people often think. We have a ceramic composting pail from Gardener’s Supply on our kitchen counter where we collect vegetarian food scraps (no dairy or meat).
When the ceramic pail is full we dump it into a large, heavy-gauge, covered, black plastic bin in our back yard, into which we also add a good bit of grass clippings, leaves and even shredded paper. We probably turn the pile a couple of times during the summer with a pitchfork, and we harvest the finished compost once a season from the bottom of the bin via a sliding door. That’s it.
Well, sort of. There are a variety of compost systems and a variety of ways to manage your pile, depending on your priorities. Here are some tips to get you started:
- If you are concerned about rodents or other animals, use a covered bin (like ours).
- The more you turn your pile the quicker you will get finished compost. If you want to make compost quickly, go with a rotating system like the Bio-Orb from New England Rain Barrel:
- For higher quality compost strive for a 30/70 ratio between “green” and “brown” matter. Green, or nitrogen rich, materials include food scraps and lawn clippings. Brown, or carbon rich, materials include dried leaves, hay, and shredded paper.
- If you live in a cold and snowy climate, make sure your bin is easily accessible in the winter or you won’t use it.
- For easier harvesting, get a bin with an access door. You can harvest finished compost from the bottom while adding fresh compostables to the top.
Of course curbside would be great–for one thing, the industrial composting facilities that process municipal composting accept all food matter including meat and dairy, which are not advisable in a home composting system. But we don’t need to wait for curbside. We can make black gold right in our own back yards. And divert 30% of our household waste from the trash.
If you’re ready to get started, you might also want to check out Earth Easy’s Guide to Home Composting and/or Mother Earth New’s article “Compost Made Easy” a comprehensive overview.
Happy composting!
By now, you’ve probably heard that many of the harsh chemicals that we spray, wipe, and scrub our homes with are not so good–for us or the planet. But maybe you’re a little fuzzy about why or what you should do to protect yourself and maintain a modicum of cleanliness.
First, here are some reasons why many of the ingredients in conventional cleaners aren’t so good (for more information see Healthy Child, Healthy World):
- Some (such as ammonium quaternary compounds and phthalates) are associated with asthma and allergies.
- Some (such as phthalates and llkyl phenol ethoxylats or APEs) are suspected or known endocrine disruptors.
- Some are suspected or known carcinogens (such as diethanolamine or DEA).
- Some form toxic byproducts when exposed to other compounds, or may be contaminated by toxic byproducts (for example, chlorine reacts with organic matter in drinking water to produce trihalomethanes, which may cause cancer and possibly developmental effects).
- Some pollute are water ways and are harmful to acquatic life (such as phosphates and EDTA).
- And some have been associated with more than one health and/or environmental concern.
Unfortunately, full ingredient disclosure is neither required nor common practice for household cleaning products, making it very difficult to find out exactly what is in these products. Adding insult to injury, many manufacturers have rushed to fill the growing market for green cleaners with products whose credentials are questionable and/or difficult to vet and verify.
In the face of this, The Natural Products Association has just stepped in with a voluntary standard and certification for natural home care products. The NPA standard is a vast improvement over the current state of affairs, providing a guaranteed level of protection against exposure to toxins.
But it does not–surprise, surpise–provide everything that a health and environmentally-conscious consumer would want. For example, the antibacterial triclosan is allowable under the standard even though it has been linked to a host of health and environmental concerns including endocrine disruption and the development of antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Of course, no standard is perfect, and I suspect that an imperfect standard is better than none at all.
In addition, there is a lot that an educated consumer can do to protect herself from chemicals in cleaning goods without relying on a standard. Advocates for local and sustainable food often advise consumers to “know your farmer.” Well I’d like to give the same advice for cleaning products. It is possible to “know your cleaning product manufacturer.” Of course it probably won’t be as personal but you can find out a lot of dependable information from conscientious, environmentally responsible companies that fully disclose all ingredients, like Seventh Generation and Ecover. In the absence of full ingredient disclosure you can generally trust specific claims, like “chlorine free” or “no petrochemical ingredients.”
Perhaps even easier and much less costly, you can also make your own cleaning products from natural & non-toxic household staples such as lemon, baking soda, vinegar and salt. In my house we use a mix of packaged and homemade cleaning products. There’s been some trial and error as we’ve tried to find and make products that we like. We started with Seventh Generation laundry detergent but have since switched to Ecover. We made our own floor cleaner from vinegar and water but we’ve since added a little Ecover floor soap to the mix. We have had only moderate success using baking soda and vinegar to open clogged drains but refuse to use chemical drain opener. So there’s a learning curve and an adjustment process–but I’d rather this than breathing in allergens, carcinogens and endocrine disruptors.
If you’d like to give DIY cleaners a try here are some resources to get your started
There are many reasons why we should eat less meat, especially less industrially produced meat. First, there are the environmental impacts: factory farms produce 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (more than transportation) and occupy 30% of global landmass (among other things). Then there are the public health impacts: antiobiotic resistance; exposure to toxins including arsenic, hormones, dioxins and PCBs; association with a host of health problems including obesity and heart disease (click here and here to learn more). Finally there are the impacts on the animals themselves, which are enough to turn your stomach.
What’s a carnivore to do? First, switch to sustainably produced animal products. Organic certification provides a step in the right direction by guaranteeing that the animals were not given hormones or antiobiotics (for non-medical purposes) and that their feed did not contain animal products, or vegetable products grown with pesticides, chemical fertilizers, sewage sludge or gmo.
However, I do not believe that organic certification goes far enough, especially in regards to animal welfare. Organic certification does not require that animals be fed their natural diet, nor does it allow them sufficient access to the outdoors. Just to take one example, organically certified beef can come from cattle who are not pastured and who primarily eat grain (cattle are ruminants and have evolved to eat grass not corn). Thus, the bulk of the meat that my family eats comes from Stillman’s, a local farm that surpasses organic standards and practices truly sustainable animal husbandry.
The second step, of course, is to eat fewer animal products. This can be a challenge for carnivores and vegetarians alike for whom meat and/or dairy is an essential part of the diet. It has certainly been a challenge in our house–especially for our kids who (naturally?) crave meat and dairy. But it’s a challenge we’ve taken on, working to integrate more meatless and almost meatless meals into our diet.
In other words, we are striving to be flexitarians–people who eat very little meat but do not cut it out from their diet completely. I first learned this term from Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. Explaining why he advises eating mostly plants, Pollan refers to studies showing that a diet rich in fruits at vegetables lowers the risk for “Western diseases” (including heart disease, obesity, and certain cancers). But he goes on to note that this health benefit is not restricted to vegans. In fact, people who eat less than 3 ounces of meat a day do not suffer the increased health risks associated with higher levels of meat consumption.
So it turns out that you can have your meat (sustainably raised and in very small amounts) and eat it too. If you care to join us, stay tuned for regular posts (including recipes) on our adventures in preparing meatless (and almost meatless) meals.
Want to know the “greenest” thing you could do this holiday season? According to Mike Tidwell of the Chesapeaker Climate Action Network, it’s to “Stop Going Green.”
In his recent editorial in the Washington Post, Tidwell argues that if we want effective and lasting solutions to environmental problems in general and global warming in particular, we need to refocus our energy away from personal lifestyle changes and towards political action.
Tidwell sees two problems with our current focus on personal greening efforts. The first is that personal greening efforts haven’t gotten us very far. The second problem is that our personal greening efforts have distracted us from the more pressing task of political action and perhaps even aided and abetted the status quo. We run our CFL fundraisers and bring our own bags to the grocery store and buy each other “eco-friendly” gifts while we continue to drill and log and mine and pave our way into oblivion.
Unfortunately I think that Tidwell is on to something here. Like Tidwell, I can “almost imagine the big energy companies secretly applauding each time we distract ourselves from the big picture with a hectoring list of “5 Easy Ways to Green Your Office.” And yes I do think that the media has inflated the importance of personal gestures like washing clothes in cold water, and canceling our junk mail. And yes we have deluded ourselves into believing that we can change the world simply by changing our light bulbs.
Simply put: we can’t solve the climate crisis by changing our lifestyle choices. Rather, we need to change the universe of possible lifestyle choices and the framework within which we make our choices. We need sound public policy that takes certain choices off of the table (like buying gas guzzlers), that makes others more accessible and compelling to more people (like living in urban environments), and that transforms others into taken-for-granted facts of life (like living in energy efficient homes).
But I do not think that we should stop going green. Unlike Tidwell I think that green lifestyle choices can support and be supported by political advocacy. As I wrote in an earlier post, I believe that there can be a synergistic relationship between individual actions and social change, especially when individual actions include both advocacy and efforts to live according to the principles for which one advocates. Instead of halting our greening efforts, let’s put them in perspective (ultimately I think this is Tidwell’s message as well).
Yes we need to make different choices. But, more importantly, we need to join our individual voices to others in advocating for political change. Put differently: we need to “choose” advocacy as the first and most important step in our efforts to “go green.” We need to make sure our elected officials step to the plate and address the environmental problems we face. And there is no problem more pressing right now than global warming.
There are lots of ways to get involved with advocacy but for climate change there is no better place to start that 1Sky, founded in 2007, not as a new organization but as “collaborative campaign” of environmental organizations, religious groups, scientists, economist, business leaders, etc. who want our leaders to tackle global warming. 1sky has developed a policy platform and spearheaded wide-reaching and effective community organizing to promote this platform. Visit 1sky to get learn more about how you can help right now, including calling President Obama to let him know that you want the US to lead the way towards a comprehensive global climate treaty at Copenhagen.
