Power Trip - looks at the US relationship with fossil fuels, and what the future might hold

I’ve spent the Christmas break reading Amanda Little’s book “Power Trip – The story of America’s love affair with energy”.  It’s an impressive book, and has a lot to recommend it.

This cushion cover is partly made from fabric reclaimed from old shirts

One of a number of things my wife has made recently with her new sewing machine is the cushion covers shown in the picture.  They look fantastic and have given new life to old cushions that had, till that point, been consigned to a shelf in the cupboard.

From an environmental impact point of view, they have the added benefit of being partially made of recycled material.  Some of the cover was made with left over pieces from another project my wife had been working on, but some of it was made from fabric cut from old, second-hand shirts.

The shirts were purchased from our local Salvation Army store.  They weren’t a style that either of us were keen on, but fantastic as a source of quality fabric!  By making use of second-hand shirts as fabric, the project has extended the life of a previously-unwanted product and avoided the environmental impact of new fabric.  While organic cottons can be found, most commercial fabric is produced from conventionally grown cotton which typically incurs a large environmental cost in its production due to its need for plenty of water and pesticides.

As an added bonus, these second-hand shirts are incredibly cheap, and the money that we did spend is used by the Salvos in helping families in need.  Low impact, environmentally responsible and helping the community – a big accomplishment from a humble cushion cover!

They're cute, but have an appetite for home-grown vegetables!

Since moving into our new house, one of the first orders of the day has been to establish a vegetable garden. The environmental benefits are pretty clear – I know exactly what pesticides have been used (none!), exactly what artificial fertilisers have been used (none!) and how much fuel was needed to transport them from the soil to my kitchen (none!).

Add to that the fact that after a week at work, getting out into the garden feels positively therapeutic and its a win-win story all round!

Unfortunately, it turns out that I’m not the only one with a taste for organically grown fresh produce. The native Australian possum also appreciates my hard work. Once the sun goes down, they’re out and sampling the smorgasbord that is my garden. I had been warned about this, but thought people were exaggerating – I’ve grown vegetables in other houses before and never had a problem. But the morning I came out to find my previously healthy parsley turned into a collection of stalks, and two of my radishes pulled out and eaten like apples, I decided to take the warnings a little more seriously.

The garden layout is still evolving, so my final possum defences are too. But I’ve put together some possum-proofing for one of my “standalone” garden beds that works quite well.

Not exactly a work of art, but it keeps the possums at bay.

As the picture shows, its a little free-standing “igloo”. When I need to access the garden, I just roll it off. If you had a helper, you could lift it off – its not at all heavy, just cumbersome.

To make it, I bought some cheap, untreated pine from my local hardware store. It was about $4 for 2.5 metres, and I ended up making the igloo about 1.5m x 1 m. This works out to be around 5 linear metres or $8. The wood was just screwed together into a rectangular frame as the base – its a bit rickety, but its not exactly a load bearing structure.

The arches of the igloo are made up of irrigation hose, screwed into the base frame. The hose I chose is flexible enough to bend into a hoop, but stiff enough to form a solid “skeleton”. I can’t remember how much I paid for the pipe – maybe $20, but I only used a small fraction of it. I’ve got enough to make several more of these igloos!

The final step was to run some fencing wire over these hoops. You can secure it to the frame with U-pins, or tie it on with wire. I happened to have some old zip-lock plastic ties I found under the house, so I recycled those!

So far (touching wood), it’s done the job. Currently that garden bed is holding some rocket, some broad beans and some brocolli, and they’ve all remained untouched. The mesh that encloses the igloo is quite coarse, so bees have no problem flying and pollinating the broad bean flowers. And of course the sun and rain can also enter freely.

Anyone else have any success stories (or horror stories) to share about possums in the garden? Feel free to discuss in the comments below.

Possum picture by “wollombi” from Flickr.  Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Dispensers like this can reduce the amount of waste from hotels

We recently came back from a short holiday away.  The holiday was short, but the distance was long – around 1200 kilometres each way!  We drove the Prius, and as you can see from the sidebar tracking my progress against my New Years Resolutions, its made quite a dent in my “allowance” of 10,000km!

We travelled in stages, stopping off for a night along the way.  In one of the hotels we stayed at, I noticed the dispensers you can see in the image on the left.  Maybe this is common in some parts of the world, but this is the first time I’ve come across such a thing.  In case the picture isn’t clear, rather than supply you with little “single use” bottles of shampoo, conditioner and single use soaps, they’ve provided a dispenser. And the little caption on the dispenser explains (for the squeamish amongst us) that the dispensers are sanitised after each guest.

Such a simple idea, but one that could have a huge impact on the amount of waste that a hotel sends to landfill.  To take a simple example, lets assume a 100 bed hotel typically has to service 70% of its rooms each day as guests come and go (I have no idea of industry averages, but you’ll get the idea).  So, in a year, that hotel will do 365 x 70 = 25,500 room changes.

A dispenser in the shower for shampoo and conditioner

The dispenser concept gets rid of all that wasted packaging, as well as the actual wasted product.  Looking at it from the hotel’s point of view, not only are they helping the environment, but there’s also potential dollars to be saved by reducing wastage.

Sure, it takes away from the “fun” of leaving your hotel with your toiletry bag packed full of oh-so-cute mini-shampoos.  But, in this case, I think the pros might just outweigh the cons….

Old carpet - how best to reuse it?

So, we’ve had our sustainably harvested, dust free bamboo flooring laid down…but what to do with the old carpet?  How on earth do you re-use 90 square metres of carpet?

Given that our main aim with our renovations is to have an environmentally friendly and sustainable home, starting off by dumping 90 square metres of carpet into landfill just felt wrong!  A search on the net yielded a few ideas, and asking around gave a few more.

The lion’s share of it went to the local archery club.  Yup, archery – the very first thing you think of when you think of carpet recycling!   When I was young, I recall archery targets were specially constructed, made of slim “bales” of compressed straw.  Nowadays, I understand, targets are constructed from boxes that are filled with multiple layers of carpet.  The carpet layers are stiff enough to absorb the impact of the arrows, but soft enough so as not to damage them.

A few rolls of the carpet in better condition was kept for use around the house.  In particular:

• I have a filing cabinet for my bills and paperwork that is just crying out to leave big scratch marks on the new bamboo flooring.  Cutting a small square of carpet to fit underneath it should solve this problem, and will be concealed by the filing cabinet itself.

• We’ve been discussing the possibility of getting a cat, although that decision is still a little way off.  If it does happen, nailing carpet around some pieces of scrap timber will provide a great scratching post, and save the $50 cost of buying one from a pet store.

• There are a few places around the house, especially while we’re setting up, where we could really do with some foot mats to wipe the dirt of our shoes.  Rather than buy brand new foot mats, we can make use of squares of carpets.

Of course, many of these uses are quite severe examples of “down-cycling” – the carpet is stepping down in its usefulness and when it has finished being used in this new fashion , it will be even harder to recycle.  Eventually it will end up in landfill.  Most recycling is like this to more or less of a degree; this is why it’s far better not to consume something in the first place.  As the famous slogan goes:

Reduce, Re-use, Recycle.  In that order!

Depending on where you live, and what sort of carpet your are getting rid of, you may have other options.  In the US, there appears to be quite a mature carpet recycling program that could be worth investigating.

If your carpet is 100% wool, a host of garden uses become available – covering your compost for added warmth, smothering weeds, and a base for sheet mulching.  Being an organic substance, it will break down naturally over time, and assuming no sprays or other treatments were applied to the wool, it won’t add any nasties to your soil.

If you’ve got any bright ideas for reusing carpet, feel free to share them in the comments below.  Also, has anyone come across ways to reuse the blue foam underlay that lies underneath the carpet?  I have to admit defeat on that one so far.  Ideas welcome!

Green Resolutions for 2009

Normally, I’m not a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions.  I figure that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing now – why wait till some arbitrary date like January 1?

Still, there are a few things that I plan to accomplish over the next 365 days to help lower my impact on the environment, and 1/1/2009 is a good a day as any to start!

Become a (sort of) vegetarian

This year, I’ll be what’s called a “pesco-vegetarian”.  This is a fancy word for someone who doesn’t eat meat (like beef and chicken), but will eat seafood.  The two main rationales I have are:

• Environmental impact -  The environmental impact of growing a kilogram of beef is far, far higher than growing a kilogram of grain

• Ethical considerations – It’s too big a topic to cover in this brief post, but in brief: what justification is there for taking a life for food…when there’s no real reason to?

I don’t eat that much meat anyway – maybe once or twice a week – so hopefully this won’t be too much of a stretch.  And like so many environmental options, this should save a bit of money too!

Limit our car use

This isn’t rocket science, but is complicated a bit this year by our move to a new house.  The new house is going to let us explore a range of new environmental options that weren’t open to us in our townhouse, but is a touch further away from work and shopping.  There is going to be a strong temptation to use the car more!

Being a fan of measurement and hard numbers, I’m going to set a limit of 10,000 kilometres for 2009 – that’s around 60-70% of the average car usage in Australia.  To add to the difficulty level, we are already committed to taking a 3000km drive in January, so we’ll use up 30% of our allotment in the first month!

As a feeble justification for those who (rightly) think 10,000 kilometres is still way to much for the ecosystem to handle, I should point out that our car is a Prius and so will emit around 1.1 tonnes of CO2 travelling that distance, rather than the 2.5 – 3.5 tonnes that an average car would do under the same conditions.

(For what its worth, we start the year off with our car odometer reading 61415)

Riding my bicycle more

Hand in hand with the last resolution, if I’m going to drive less, I’d like to pick up that slack on my bike.  I have big plans to get a bike trailer and panniers this year to make the bicycle a solid contender for a wider variety of trips – commuting to work, visiting friends as well as going shopping.

For even more incentive, I’m going to set myself a target of doing 1500km on my bike in 2009 – so around 30km a week.

Being able to get around town without emitting climate changing CO2 and other pollutants, getting fitter, as well as saving money on petrol and parking – it’s a no-brainer!

Of course, that’s not the only green items on the agenda for next year.  We’ve got plenty of plans to green our new house, as well as getting into growing our own vegetables in the garden.  But there’s a few solid targets for me to judge my efforts on this time next year.

What about everyone else?  Thought up some interesting green targets for 2009?  Share them with us in the comments below!

(Photo in the public domain from Jon Sullivan and PDPhoto.org)

The new bamboo flooring installed

Our new place had been a rental for the last few years, and a little TLC is definitely called for.  So before we make any massive changes, we’ve decided to give it a bit of a “face lift” by way of new floors, fresh paint, and new light fittings.  I’ll post about all these things over the coming weeks, and some of the things we’re factoring in to our decisions.  But first stop, (and the first thing completed!) is the flooring.

The first thing to consider is whether you really need to replace the flooring.  Typically the “greenest” option is not to consume resources in the first place, so if you can avoid throwing out old flooring and buying something new, you’ll have a lower environmental impact.

In our case, the house had carpet that had been water damaged in the past and wasn’t in great nick.  But more important is the dust factor.  My wife is allergic to dust mites and some sort of hard flooring is going to really help in keeping the dust down.

One option is to polish up the floorboards that are already there.  In our case, the house has softwood pine flooring which is pretty scuffed and dented.  It’s also pretty uneven with a lot of gaps for drafts to flow in, and different levels where old extensions hadn’t met the existing floor line.  So we opted to go with a covering over the existing floor boards.

The original carpet that was replaced with the bamboo

We ended up choosing bamboo.  Truth be told, I’ve been looking into bamboo as a flooring option for a while, and this was a great opportunity to stop reading about it, and get it installed!

Bamboo is a great green option if you’re leaning towards timber flooring.  It looks just like wood (see the photos on this post), even though it’s technically a grass.  It also grows incredibly rapidly, with a typical plantation being ready for harvest in 5 years or so, rather than the 20+ years for more traditional timber plantations.  Those quicker harvest times mean quicker turnover, so less acreage is needed.  In terms of hardness, there are a range of styles available that are approximately equivalent to jarrah all the way up to the equivalent  hardness of ironbark!

The biggest environmental downside is probably the transport-related emissions.  I was only able to find flooring sourced from China – I didn’t come across any from Australian-based plantations (although there are Australian plantations out there).  So, there’s going to be more transport-related emissions for my bamboo flooring than from wood sourced from an Australian plantation.

In terms of styles, you’re likely to come across 3 basic variations:

• Horizontal, where the bamboo is sliced up into little planks that are laid horizontally – this shows the natural “knots” or segments in the bamboo to great effect, and is usually of moderate hardness.

• Vertical, similar to the horizontal, but the planks are laid vertically – this has more of a fine grain appearance and has similar hardness to Horizontal

• Woven, where the bamboo is spliced into threads that are then compressed together  – this gives a very wood like appearance, and can be very hard.

We ended up choosing the woven bamboo.  I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to find stockists – a search on the Yellow Pages quickly threw up a few businesses.  As always, it pays to get multiple quotes.  We encountered a big range in both expertise and in pricing.  As a guideline, in 2008 when we went looking, we encountered prices from around $80 a square metre to $140 a square metre, fully laid.  This is going to vary based on (among other things) the variety of bamboo, where you live, the surface that you’re laying it on, the preparation required, and the installer’s own margins.  I’ve also spoken to people who installed it themselves – its apparently pretty straightforward, and a good way to save some money.

Installation was a combination of glues and invisible nails.  There’s going to be some amount of off-gassing from the glues that you’re probably best avoiding right after the installation.  We weren’t living in the premises during or straight after the install, but we certainly noticed the smell of glue for a few days after the install on our visits.

You can see the finished result in the photos – we’re really happy with the results.  Of course, only time will tell how it stands up to day-to-day living, we’ll keep you posted!

Moving from a townhouse into a house

We’re about to start a new journey in lowering our environmental impact.  In the next few days we begin the process of moving from a townhouse into a new freestanding house.  The challenge will be to see just how much we can lower the environmental footprint of the house, and the inhabitants living in it!

The house has good and bad environmental aspects.  The medium size back yard faces about 30 degrees east of north, so there are reasonable prospects for passive solar heating, solar hot water, photovoltaic cells and vegetable growing (in the Southern Hemisphere, a northerly aspect is ideal for solar access – its the reverse in the Northern Hemisphere).  On the negative side, the house is around 50 years old, dating it to a period when designing for the environment was practically unheard of!  There is very little insulation, and a lot of the living areas are on the cold south side of the building.  Come winter, the only heating is provided by a single unflued gas heater.

It’s been a while since the house had any tender loving care, with peeling paint throughout, and carpet that has well and truly seen better days.  So another challenge will be attempting to give it a facelift with the least possible environmental impact.

There are going to be plenty of compromises along the way.  Some of the “greenest” options are going to be out of our price range.  We’re going to have to go through the renovation bit by bit, as we save our pennies.  And, despite my best efforts, my attempts to persuade my wife to accept the introduction of a composting toilet appear to be in vain!

We’re expecting to make plenty of mistakes along the way.  Our plan is to “think aloud” on these pages as we work through the various decisions, and we’d love to hear peoples’ thoughts and experiences in the comments.

Hopefully, it will prove to be an educational experience for those of you following our progress.  All the fun of renovation without the mess!

(Image by “the truth about”, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license)

Working with fossil fuels can expose people to health risks

I received an email today from the Mesothelioma and Asbestos Awareness Center today.  They are a health resource providing information on the hazards of abestos, especially mesothelioma – a particular nasty form of cancer, primarily caused by exposure to asbestos fibres.

Australians would be well aware of the dangers of asbestos, thanks in part to Bernie Banton.  Bernie was a former worker at James Hardie’s asbestos plant.  Sadly he passed away last year, but not before becoming the very public face of mesothelioma, and raising the profile of asbestos-related diseases.

One of the interesting, and disturbing, things I found out from the Mesothelioma and Asbestos Awareness Center’s email was of the link between fossil fuel industries and asbestos exposure.  Thanks to the heat resistance, flame retardent qualities and chemical inertness of asbestos, for some period of time it was in extensive use in the oil refining industry.

As a result, workers at affected oil refining plants have experienced a higher rate of asbestos-related diseases.  A number of studies have been done in this area.  A study of UK workers in oil refineries found elevated rates of mesothelioma, as did another study of workers in an Italian oil refinery.

It’s not just the use of asbestos in oil refineries that poses a health risk.  Crude oil and its refined products are themselves known carcinogens.  Substances such as benzene, coal tars, and shale oils are all on the known carcinogen list produced by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

As the email I received said, “few people realize that our environmental attitudes and behaviors are harming not only the earth for our children but also the workers who toil in these hazardous environments”.  Not only are fossil fuels contributing towards dangerous climate change, but they pose immediate dangers for people who have to work with it.

Renewable energy sources, like solar cells or wind turbines, can also involve the use of some dangerous chemicals during construction.  But once constructed, wind turbines and solar cells continue to provide clean power without producing either climate changing carbon dioxide or other potentially carcinogenic emissions.  By contrast, fossil fuels continually require extraction, refining, then combustion to produce power, with each stage resulting in its own emissions.

Not only for the climate, but also from a health perspective, renewable energy sources are clearly preferable to the traditional fossil fuels.  Hopefully, we’re already heading down a path where renewable energy starts to become a larger and larger part of our energy mix.  Not only would this help safeguard the health of the next generation, but it might make a difference to our generation too.

If you’d like more information on asbestos-related diseases, you may want to check out the following sites:

• http://www.maacenter.org/
• http://www.asbestos.net/