The participants maintained a single trash can for a year. At the end of the year, the participants had a little weigh-in to determine who’d generated the most waste.
A Single Trash Can Over Three Months
That’s pretty hardcore, so I started thinking about a less extreme challenge. What if we attempted to only generate a single trash can of garbage over three months? By ‘trash can’, I mean a largish indoor bin, like one of those free-standing, foot-pedal-operated ones you typically find in a kitchen.
That seems pretty achievable. We’ve got robust recycling here in BC, and an apartment composter that processes everything organic excepting bones and citrus fruit waste. The tricky bit would be not buying any big consumer items like, say, a new laptop, that’s accompanied by a lot of non-recyclable waste. We have no kids, which are, I gather, engines of consumer waste.
And we wouldn’t make it a challenge–I’m not a particularly competitive sort. I wouldn’t do it for the conservation alone. But it would be a good exercise in thinking more carefully about how much we consume, and how much ends up in a landfill. And maybe then I could convince a couple of friends, family members or readers to do the same thing.
In any case, our composter is on the fritz (the motor got all corroded), so we have to wait for replacement parts. If I can convince Julie, though, we might give it a try this winter.
Could you only fill one trash bin over three months?
Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella’s parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.
This qualifies as a client plug, I suppose, but it’s a cause that’s really close to my heart.
We’re doing some work with Greenpeace Canada, Sierra Club of BC and ForestEthics on the continuing campaign to save BC’s Great Bear rainforest.
The Great Bear Rainforest is a huge swath of the land–the size of Austria–on BC’s central coast. It’s home to three kinds of bears, six million migratory birds, 3000 genetically distinct salmon stocks and many species of plants unique to the region. Most importantly, it’s the largest tract of intact coastal temperate rainforest left on Earth.
As you may recall, there was a landmark agreement in 2006 among various stakeholders–the provincial government, logging companies, First Nations and environmentalists. They agreed to a new approach to resource planning developed by an independent team of scientists, and committed to its implementation by March 31, 2009. But we’re not (ahem) out of the woods yet. From the petition:
A couple of years ago, Premier Campbell made a very specific commitment to preserve this precious rainforest. The final countdown is on for the BC government to make their promise a reality by the March 31, 2009 deadline. Premier Campbell needs to hear from you.
We are down to the wire. Unless all elements of the promise are kept, the ecological health of the rainforest will be in jeopardy once again. We’ve come so far towards the rare success of having a vast unspoiled forest safeguarded, let’s not undermine all this good work by not reaching the finish line.
Give Me an Early Christmas Present: Sign This Petition
If you can spare 37 seconds, I’d really appreciate it if you would sign the petition urging the government of BC to keep their promises regarding this precious region. You don’t have to be from BC, either–support from other parts of the globe really helps.
If you’re keen to help beyond signing the petition, consider any of the following:
Blog, tweet, bookmark or otherwise spread the word on the campaign.
Watch, favourite and share this two-minute YouTube video about the project:
Thanks to Emily, Raul, Monique, Rebecca and everybody else who has written about the campaign thus far. We’re making good progress, but we’ve got a ways to go.
For the past couple of years, I’ve advocated to anybody who would listen that I thought there was great online opportunity in forming a green ad network. Something like The Deck or Federation Media, but for a group of vetted, popular environmental and sustainability sites. There has, of course, been an explosion of such sites on the web in the past few years. A few such networks exist, but they all feela littlehokey.
They haven’t got a list of publishers up yet. This seems fairly crucial, so I’m going to email them and enquire about that. Regardless, I think that such a network might be able to weather the economic downturn better than most.
UPDATE: I got a prompt response from goodsense founder and CEO Adam Wood: “We’re just finalizing our list of publishers and expect to have one we can share publicly in the next couple of weeks.”
I’m a big fan of Wordle. Everybody likes pretty tag clouds, but until recently, I’ve had no practical use for the tool.
What with the forthcoming election and all, and being in marketing, I thought it might be interesting to use Wordle to distill each of the four national parties’ websites into a tag cloud. The cloud would reflect the terms that the party uses most frequently on their English-language websites. With an assist from Ask Metafilter, I got them done. I’ll explain a little more about how after the clouds.
As usual, click for larger versions:
What Conclusions Can We Draw?
That’s more a question for you than me, as I haven’t spent much time trying to grok what these clouds tell us (yes, I used ‘grok’). What jumps out at you?
How Did We Make Them?
First, I grabbed a complete copy of each party’s website. I just stuck with HTML files, so if a party hosts a lot of PDFs with unique content, then that’s not reflected. The sites, of course, ended up being different sizes, and I’m relying on my site-copying software, so I can’t be certain I got all the pages.
Then we concatenated each set of HTML files into one gigantic file. Using some scripty-magic, we generated the top 100 or 250 words, each appearing as many times as they appear in the original site.
I went through each of these to clean out most or all of the leftover HTML code, navigational terms like ‘email’ or ‘newsletter’ and French words. The French is why we used 250 words in some cases. For some sites, I downloaded both the French and English version of the site, so I needed to remove the French. By working with a 250 word file, I was able to clean out the French and still have a sizable database of words.
In short, it’s somewhat unscientific, but I’m optimistic that the clouds represent a reasonably fair reflection of each site’s top content. If anyone wants to work with the content I copied, I’m happy to share it. I’m not going to publish the complete sites here, though, as I expect that would constitute a copyright violation.
Over at Slate’s excellent Green Lantern column, I read about yet another of those tiny debates that green-minded people have (you may recall my razor question a while back) about which products are the most product choices:
As a new middle-school teacher, I’m facing a challenge I never thought about before: assigning a list of school supplies for my students. My colleagues tell me that there’s a real downside to wooden pencils, since it gives students an excuse to get up every few minutes and use the pencil sharpener. But am I being environmentally irresponsible by asking parents to buy plastic mechanical pencils?
This seems profoundly trivial for the average person, but I suppose a teacher generates a lot of pencil-related consumption over their career.
On a CBC podcast last week, I heard about Solar Taxi. This Swiss dude named Louis Palmer is, with the help of academics and experts, driving a solar-powered vehicle around the world:
On 3 July 2007 I set off on my first journey around the world with a solar powered vehicle. Admittedly, as a regular citizen I cannot change the world but I can demonstrate to the world just how dire the global climate situation has become and how many sophisticated solutions to lower the greenhouse gases already exist, which bring with them many other advantages. So that we can have a better world and a more secure future. The solar taxi should rekindle hope and a zest for life, set an example to counteract resignation and stimulate reflection. And show that every single one of us can take a step towards preserving our planet.
Check out his route. Thus far he’s gone 34,644 km, with a goal of over 50,000.
He sounded really charming on the CBC, and his great videos bear that charm out:
Hang dry. I also do this because I’m obsessed with my clothes not shrinking.
Go vegetarian once a week.
Telecommute.
Abandon your answering machine. Apparently if everybody switched to voice mail, “the annual energy savings would total nearly two billion kilowatt-hours”.
Pay bills online.
These changes aren’t going to save the planet from environmental Armageddon, but they’re a good start.
I agree with every point in the list–they all jibe with our experience. None of his ideas are earth-shattering, but they’re definitely useful:
If there is a true community around your site, then members will overlook a lot of faults. On ObamaCycle, campaign materials are “listed” in discussion forum format, but the formatting sucks and it’s hard to find stuff. Despite that a lot of people have and continue to use the site.
Of course, Furqan benefited from having an eager real-world community to connect with, but it sounds like he did lots of stuff right.
I liked it so much, I submitted it to Digg and Reddit.
She’s been spending the last year making one environmentally-friendly change to her life each day. She’s been blogging about her experience, writing a column in the National Post, and has a forthcoming book.
On a related note, the CBC opted not to specify that Ms. Farquharson was a journalist. For some inexplicable reason, that felt ingenuine (screw you, I’m using it).
Mach 3 or Plugged In?
I was shaving yesterday, and thinking about green choices. Staring at my razor blade, I wondered which was the greener option: an electric razor or one with disposable blades?
To compare, we need to think about all the factors that contribute to the manufacturing, shipping, usage and disposal of each technology.
For the average Gilette Mach 3, we need to consider:
The environmental costs and energy usage of manufacturing the razor shafts, disposable razors and shaving cream. I use a shaving brush, too.
The fuel consumed during shipping to stores.
The waste generated in packaging.
The water used during shaving. I probably shave 300 days out of the year, and use, maybe, 750 ml of water each time. If I shave for, say, 65 years, that’s 91 oil drums of water. Or, if you like, 15 hot tubs worth of water. Just on shaving. That’s depressing.
The energy used to heat the water.
Cost of disposal, including the fuel consumed to transport the discarded razors and shaving cream containers. More importantly, how long will the plastic bits hang around?
There’s a similar, though shorter list for an electric razor:
Manufacturing the razor.
Shipping it to the store.
Electricity used in powering the razor over its lifetime.
Disposal of the razor.
Which is the greener option? I have no idea. It’s an easy thought experiment, but practically speaking, a remarkably difficult thing to figure out. Environmental impact is measured in lots of ways: energy consumed, ecosystems impacted, pollution, and so forth. The first problem that I can see is that there’s no common currency for all of these factors.
Thinking about this stuff is, admittedly, one of those things that white people like to do. Still, I can imagine a good blog entitled “What’s Greener” that asks and answers these questions about small, everyday items like razors.
For the record, the greenest shaving option is to just let that mofo grow. The next greenest is to use an old school straight-razor (no ivory handle, thanks very much). I’ve never had the pleasure–are they difficult to use?
UPDATE: Elijah points out in the comments that there’s already a blog by Grist on this very subject. Handy.
