Greening Neighborhoods

Red, White, Green and Blue 4th of July

Bring a little GREEN to your Red, White, and Blue this year

July 4th is a day to celebrate our independence and no doubt there will be much food, drink, fireworks, and whole lot of fun.  Here are a few ways you can keep your 4th of July a little cleaner and a little greener.  

• Choose China over Disposable - Reduce waste by choosing traditional tableware that can be washed and reused instead of disposable plates and plasticware.  Also, ask your party guests to BYOM “Bring Your Own Mug”. 

• Choose Organic Food - Buy locally grown and organic produce and avoid foods produced and raised with chemicals and preservatives.  Yuck!  

• Save and Reuse your Decorations - When you are done with your party, pack up all your party supplies and use them again next year.  Not only will this cut down on unnecessary waste, it will save money next year for more food and drinks!

• Green your Grill - There is still a debate of which makes the better burger, charcoal or propane.  If you prefer charcoal, choose a more friendly option like Wicked Good charcoal made from industrial scrap wood, or Kingsford Charwood that is produced using clean-energy turbine heat.  And if you a propane griller, well it may be a little greener on the other side; propane produces half the emissions of generic charcoals. 

• Greener Fireworks - Fireworks are not exactly environmentally friendly.  Skip your own fireworks this year and go to the local fireworks display.  However, if your 4th of July is not the same without your own display, choose fireworks rich in nitrogen.  Nitrogen-rich propellants burn smoke free.

• Recycle - One of the easiest ways to green your party is to recycle your waste.  Make sure you have clearly marked bins for your recyclables.

Above all, have fun, be careful, and have a HAPPY 4th of July from Solid Waste Solutions!

Lew

Memorial Weekend Carbon Footprint

Look at this information from GE on the nation’s carbon footprint from automobile traffic over the Memorial Day weekend.  It assumes that everyone drove an average car that gets 25 mpg.  Then the actual carbon footprint is compared to what could have been if everyone drove a fuel efficient car.

Follow this link for the graphic.

http://www.ge.com/visualization/driving_emissions/

Tip - Dual Flush Toilets

Install a dual flush toilet and save thousands of gallons of treated water per month.  The cost of the toilet would be around $400, less tax credits and other discounts.

Compared to a 6 gallons per flush (gpf) toilet, in one year a dual flush toilet will save 26,640 gallons of water for a family of three.  The yearly water bill savings will be $424.48.  That should pay for the new toilet

Another option would be to install a device called a ONE2FLUSH dual flush toilet kit, which will cut your flush amount by ½ for liquid flushes.  For solids, the flush will be the same as the capacity of the original toilet.  The cost of the ONE2FLUSH kit is $30.00.  The yearly savings with a 5 gpf toilet will be about $175.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yclRfIIWzjY

A third option is an $6.00 device called a Flexflush that will reduce the liquid flush to around .8 gallons per flush.  Like the ONE2FLUSH, the solid flush will be full tank and use whatever amount of water the toilet capacity is.  For a 6gpf toilet the yearly savings will be about 13,300 gallons of water, and a $212.00 reduction in water bills.  The FlexFlush will pay for itself in ten days.  See below.

http://www.easywatersaving.com/index.html

http://www.easywatersaving.com/Installation_Instructions_01.pdf

Tip - Save money per flush

The United States has excellent sources of treated drinking water.  For the most part the water supple is so reliable and of such high quality that it is taken for granted – and wasted.

Every time you flush a toilet you are sending around 4.5 gallons of clean, drinkable, treated water into the sewers. Water that you pay for.

Here is a simple, zero cost, way to reduce wasted water. Simply grab an old bottle from the recycling and fill it up with water (or sand or $3,000 in pennies) and place it in your toilet tank. What ever amount of water you displace you will in turn save!

Give it a test flush to make sure that it still has the clearing power (you don’t want to flush multiple times!). You can figure out how much water you’ll save by subtracting the displaced water from the amount in the tank. Multiply that by the number of flushes in a day/month/year.

Tip - What Each of Us Can Do About BP and the Spill

Most of us are pretty upset about the oil spill in the Gulf.  A couple of my friends have promised to get even with BP by not filling up at any of their gas stations even though the pretty, eco-friendly green and blue logo is prominently displayed. 

But that’s not how to get even.  If we really want to get even we have to stop using the oil companies’ products.  We have to walk more.  We have to bike more.  We have to take public transportation more.  And we have to drive less.

• Walking ten miles a week to do errands saves nearly half a gallon of gas.
• Biking thirty miles a week to get around the neighborhood saves over a gallon of gas.
• Taking public transportation seventy-five miles to and from work each week saves three gallons.
• Ride sharing with just one other person saves ninety miles a week or 3.6 gallons of gas.

This might not seem like much, but by walking, biking and ride sharing we would save 270 gallons of gas a year.  If everyone followed this prescription we could cut our national gasoline usage in half.  That’s getting even with BP for the oil spill.

Extra Heavy Oil

There is a great deal of oil out there. Enough to keep up with ever increasing demand for years to come. The trouble is, we’ve picked most of the low hanging fruit. It is becoming ever more challenging to extract oil. This is clearly evident with the recent disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Alleged misconduct aside, drilling holes 5,000 feet underwater is just plain tough to do. This is the collateral damage caused by our thirst for oil.

There is another means of collecting oil that may be far worse (via Wikipedia):

Oil sands, extra heavy oil, or tar sands, are a type of bitumen deposit. The sands are naturally occurring mixtures of sand or clay, water and an extremely dense and viscousform of petroleum called bitumen. They are found in large amounts in many countries throughout the world, but are found in extremely large quantities in Canada and Venezuela.^[1]

Oil sands reserves have only recently been considered to be part of the world’s oil reserves, as higher oil prices and new technology enable them to be profitably extracted and upgraded to usable products. Oil sands are often referred to as unconventional oil or crude bitumen, in order to distinguish the bitumen extracted from oil sands from the free-flowing hydrocarbon mixtures known as crude oil traditionally produced from oil wells.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sands

The impact this method has on the planet is terrible, but you can check that out on your own. I want to talk about the embedded cost of this oil in one specific way: WATER.

The Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta Canada need 2–4.5 cubic meters of water to produce 1 cubic meter of synthetic crude oil. As I’ve pointed out before we don’t have much water to drink. So we are producing oil in an increasingly unfriendly way, plus we are using enormous amounts of other resources in the process. This adds the the embedded cost of the oil we use. We don’t pay for it now, but in the future we will. Because as you know, we can’t drink oil.

This week I’ll focus on oil related tips so you can reduce your impact and save money (now and in the future)