A few weeks ago there was a story on NPR about Barack Obama’s trip through Asia. While in China, he took part in a town-hall like meeting with ‘ordinary’ Chinese citizens, although the Chinese reporter for NPR confirmed that everyone who participated was hand selected by the government.
In any case, one of the questions asked of the NPR reporter who was at the town hall was, "what question would you have asked President Obama if your question was selected?" (because it obviously wasn’t). His answer was something along the lines of "I would ask him when Americans were going to do their part in helping to prefent global warming." (Or "climate change" if you prefer). Except the way he said it, he wasn’t sayinig "America the country," but rather "individual American citizens."
I am not here to debate his question. I for one can totally understand why people in other countries think America (and therefore Americans) are arrogant about many things, including climate change.
What I wanted to do was go through the things that I do for the environment. Sort of a chronicle of all the ways in which I help to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Maybe I’ll look back at this in 10 years and think "I was doing so little back then." Or maybe, in 10 years, things won’t have changed.
But I do believe I and my community are doing a lot, and are on the right rack. It must be a Blue State thing: I for one trust my city & state in general to move in the right direction (for the most part) when it comes to the environment.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
What are we doing to reduce waste in our house? A lot, as it turns out. Today is garbage collection day in my neighborhood, so I snapped a photo of the bins outside our house. See the small one on the left? That’s garbage. The one in the middle is recycling. The one on the right is yard waste.
That small garbage can is actually large for our area – most of my neighbors have one that’s about half that size. We (currently 3 adults + 3 cats, but usually just 2 adults + the cats) usually fill it each week. Not overstuffed full, but 2 kitchen garbage bags full.
The recycling is collected every other week, and it’s about twice as big as the garbage bin. Typically, the recycling container is stuffed full of paper, cardboard, cans, and bottles. Given that the bin is twice as big but collected half as often, that means we’re recycling about as much as we’re throwing away during a given month.
The yard waste container is the largest of them all, and it’s collected weekly. It’s not just yard waste, but compost too – so instead of throwing away food or putting it down the garbage disposal, we put our food scraps in here. The compost/yard waste program also accepts things like greasy pizza boxes, food-soiled paper plates, etc., so a lot of stuff that might otherwise be trash (because it’s too dirty to recycle) is instead composted. Of course on top of the food scraps, it’s also where we put the leaves, grass, and twigs from the yard that we rake up. When we spend an afternoon outside doing yardwork, the yard waste bin is typically full by collection day. When we don’t, it’s about 1/3 full. On average, I’d say there’s about as much in the yard waste bin every week as the trash.
So, it looks like from a household point of view, about 1/3 of our waste is trash, and 2/3 is recycling and yardwaste. But that’s not all we do.
Our city (Seattle, WA) has some great plans to help reduce power & energy costs at home. For instance, they send out free low-flow shower heads (one of which is installed in our home), they discount the cost of low-energy light bulbs (which we use all over the house when possible), and they support rain water collection with a subsidized rain barrel program (which we’re not partaking of yet, but want to).
Additionally, the city will either collection at your curb, or accept at approved locations, old TV’s, computers, and monitors for FREE. They’ll take other e-waste (old cellphones, printers, etc.) for small but reasonable fee. In the past year I think I’ve recycled 3 TV’s & computers and 20 LBS of e-waste in this manner.
What else?
All of our toilets are low-flow toilets. We recently de-commissioned an older 2nd fridge that probably wasn’t very energy-efficient. We run our (gas) central furnce on an electronic thermostat, so it only heats the house when we’re home. All of our windows are double-paned, and we’ve started to improve the seals around the doors to keep the leaks to a minimum. We recently installed an Evolve Showerhead on our upstairs (main) shower, which doesn’t have a low-flow showerhead in it. Most of our yard is landscaped so we don’t have to water it. We keep trees and bushes in our yard so that we provide a habitat to the local fauna.
For our cats, we’ve experimented with environmentally-friendly litter, like Barn Dry. Unfortunately one of our cats won’t use it, so we have to keep regular litter in at least one litter box at all times.
Our PCs hibernate automatically when not in use. We’re good at turning off lights when we’re not using them. My wife and I carpool to work nearly every day of the week. We buy organic, local food when possible. We have those reusable shopping bags that we take to the grocery store so we don’t have to hear "Paper or Plastic?"
The city and state are moving in the right direction
The City of Seattle is doing a lot of the right things to help the environment. There are recycling bins all over the place, making it just as easy to recycle a bottle or can while you’re out as it is at home.
Washington State is diversifying its power sources to include more renewable energy. Most of WA’s power comes from hydroelectric-generating dams.
We’re not perfect
There are still a few areas that we have some work to do at home on, but they’re big-ticket things. For example, our cars, which are 2001 & 2002 models, are reasonable energy efficient but they’re not hybrids (and I mean good hybrids, not those power-boosting trucks that claim to be hybrids but are really horrible). Bacl when I was purchasing our cars, hybrids were new, untested technologies that I wasn’t ready to make a bet on.
I’m pretty sure the insulation in the attic of the house is not up to modern insulation codes. Our major appliances, while all are fairly new (at least 15 years old), are also not up to date with modern energy use codes (fortunately the city supplies incentives to buy newer, more energy-efficient appliances, and I heard that there’s a Federal program that will do the same thing as well).
Overall, I feel good abouut what we’re doing. Being environmentally friendly is definitely on our minds when we make purchases and choices about how to spend our time and money. I hope that if more people do this, other people will realize that Americans (as individuals) are doing their part, and do care for the environment. Let’s see if we can turn their opinion of us around quickly.
So what are you doing?
