Since recycling receives the most attention, most people have a pretty good idea of what should be done. The hard part then becomes doing it, all the time.

What can we easily recycle, and how do we do it? Unfortunately, this varies significantly from county to county and state to state. Here in Fairfax County, VA, we are lucky – we dump paper, plastic, glass, and cans into our cubside pick-up bins once a week. In other places, these items need to be kept separate, and sometimes even glass needs to be separated by color.

The things we recycle through our weekly curb-site pick-up include:

• Paper mail and envelopes. If it has personal info, it goes through the shredder first.
• All cardboard boxes, whether food (cereal, crackers, etc.) or shipping (corrugated cardboard, etc.)
• Phone books, newspapers, and any other paper that comes along. No paper goes in our trash unless it’s contaminated with food.
• Glass bottles, glass jars (from jams, ketchup, etc. — more and more are plastic now though), aluminum soda cans, metal food cans (soup, corn, etc.).
• Plastic bottles and jugs. The interesting twist here is that only bottles with a neck narrower than the bottle are allowed—i.e. soda bottles and gallon milk jugs are good, but sour cream containers are not.

After these basics, there are a couple other things we regularly recycle that require a little extra attention:

• Yard waste like weeds, branches, and brush has to be tied or placed in specific types of bags (check your county) and left at the curb on certain days.
• Electronics recycling has gained attention in recent years. A few times a year we make a trip to a monthly PC Recycler, Inc. free residential collection event. We drop off any old or broken electronics such as computer equipment, DVD players, stereo equipment, etc. “Anything with a plug” is their motto.

Something we don’t currently do is composting food scraps. This is probably because the majority of our leftover food scraps end up inside our dogs! However, I’ve heard from friends who do it that it’s good way to reduce the need for purchasing fertilizer.

Have any other recycling suggestions? Click through to the web site and leave a comment on the post!

Click the Fairfax County recycling guidelines image below for a full-sized PDF version:

• After getting take-out food, delivery, or taking home half our meal in a “doggie bag”, we often hang on to the “box” from the restaurant. Many are surprisingly high quality, and we use them to send food home with family after big meals (Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc.) or to hold any leftovers from our meals at home.
• When buying groceries, we select plastic bags (read: Paper or Plastic?). The ones that meet our quality assurance standard after use get taken with us on dog walks, to clean up after our dogs. The ones that don’t pass QA get taken back to the supermarket for recycling.

• Kathie has a Tassimo single-cup coffee machine. These are convenient but can be pretty environmentally unfriendly. She takes the extra effort to take apart each T-Disc after use. The foil top goes in the trash, the plastic container gets recycled, and the coffee goes into our fridge to absorb odors (no need to buy baking soda!). After a while in the fridge the coffee goes into the garden as fertilizer.
• Any single-sided printouts or papers go into my “scrap paper” stack which I use continuously for brainstorming and outlining when I’m developing software. Kathie also uses them to print out needlework (stitching and knitting) patterns until she’s finished. Then it goes into the recycle bin.
• We rarely use paper plates, plastic forks and knives and cups. Use the real thing, wash it, and use it again. We have a great set of unbreakable cups we can use when kids are around.
• When we buy things from Amazon (or wherever), we hang on to many of the delivery boxes, the styrofoam peanuts, bags of air, and other packing materials. We sometimes sell things on Ebay and are able to give these disposables a second life.
• Speaking of Ebay, selling unwanted things is the ultimate in re-use, and makes us money! Mostly we sell Xbox 360 video games we’ve completed, and electronics like iPods when we upgrade to newer models.

We thought of a bunch of other things we re-use, but aren’t looking to make an exhaustive list—just some ideas to get the brain thinking. As before, feel free to click through to the article and leave a comment at the bottom with other ideas. Next up: recycling…

I’ve come to realize there are two types of things we can reduce – one is usage-based consumables like water, electricity, or gasoline, and the other is more traditional items we buy individually. Here’s some examples of what we do today. In many cases they’re minor, but that’s OK!

• When shopping for just a couple items, we ask the check-out clerk to not put them in a bag.
• Avoid accepting (or buying!) “junk”. For example, at work, vendors love to give out low-capacity USB memory sticks, gimmicky toys, or junky pens. These usually end up in the trash a few days later.
• I recently switched to Sanyo Eneloop rechargeable batteries due to the rate my wireless keyboards, mice, and noise-canceling headphones were chewing up AA and AAA batteries.
• We are very reliable at eating our leftovers, whether from a restaurant or our home-cooking. This means less new food to buy, and less trash!
• Minimize printing, or print double-sided when possible.
• Part of our morning routine used to be picking up the various free “Examiner” style newspapers from our driveway, and depositing them in our recycle bin. A quick call to the papers, and they now skip our house.
• We’ve found that a half-sheet of Bounce works just as well to prevent static cling in the dryer, and the clothes don’t smell as strongly of Bounce.

The “usage-based” ways of reducing are probably much better understood and commonly followed:

• Gasoline: we don’t use a lot, mainly because we don’t drive much (my commute to work is 6 miles, and I’ll sometimes be biking to work this summer). Our cars aren’t particularly fuel-efficient though, something we should improve the next time we replace them.
• Water: We have a high-efficiency washing machine that uses very little water, and I’ve installed adjustable flappers in our toilets set to use the minimum amount of water possible. Outside however, we have a very large yard and irrigation system. We program it to use as little water as possible to keep our yard green, and ensure our sprinklers aren’t “watering the road” like many others on the street, but it still uses a lot of water. When we know the forecast calls for a fair bit of rain, we will turn off our sprinklers until they are needed again. On the bright side, the water goes into the ground to support the water table, rather than down the sewer.
• Utilities: Fortunately, our house is very well insulated, so our heating and cooling energy usage is low for a house this size. When our air conditioner/heat pump failed last year, we replaced it with a 15-seer model which is 15-20% more efficient than the current government standard 13-seer. Our washer has an ultra-high-speed spin cycle that squeezes out more water than most which means less drying time needed.
• Electricity: We’re pretty diligent about turning off lights when not in use (home automation FTW!), and our entertainment center is powered via a smart power strip that cuts power to all our accessories when the TV is turned off, eliminating so-called vampire power draws. That said, our TV is a power-hungry plasma, all our light bulbs are incandescent (they’re on dimmers, making fluorescent problematic), and we have lots of computers and other equipment drawing power all the time.
• We use programmable thermostats in the house to use less heat/AC while no one is home and close vents in all the rooms we do not use. During the summer, we move our TV and office into the basement where it is cooler. This allows us to keep the main floor warmer than usual in the summer. In the winter, we move back upstairs onto the main floor and thereby reduce the need to heat the basement.

Have other suggestions? Leave a comment!

We all know the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle trifecta, but in my experience only the last one—Recycle—gets much attention or conscious thought in our minds. What’s interesting is that the order they are listed in does matter.

While certainly important and worthwhile, recycling is the least effective and “last resort” solution for trash. Rather than sending something to a landfill, I can send it to be re-made into something new. It still needs to be hauled around though, and energy expended to recycle it, and its new form may end up in a landfill if the next owner is not as diligent.

Stepping up the ladder one rung, reusing items when possible is a significantly better choice. Now the item in question doesn’t need to leave my home at all, saving all that transportation and recycling energy. As an extra bonus, since it’s something I am now reusing, in some cases I’m also not spending money to buy a new one!

This leads us to the top of the ladder: reducing. Not buying (or accepting for free) an item in the first place not only means it doesn’t have to be sent away for recycling, it also means it doesn’t need to be manufactured in the first place—the ultimate in “green”.

My next three posts will address each of these options. I’ll be listing ways Kathie and I currently contribute to each “R”, and I hope you’ll leave some comments with other suggestions on how we can do more. We don’t claim to be an especially “green” household, but I think we do pretty well overall. If we can find a few incremental ways to improve, we’re looking forward to trying them out!

Landfill photo from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill

This site, mfischer.com, will return to its roots as the personal blog about Mike Fischer. To publish my technology articles I’ve created a new blog under a new domain: thelastpixel.net. I’ve just gotten started with it, but plan to post regularly on software development and other technology issues. If you’re interested, check it out and sign up for the RSS subscription! If not, just keep watching here for more non-technical news from my life…

Well, in August I had my scan, and as usual, everything turned out fine. Next scan in January. Happy to say that the last two and a half years have probably been my healthiest of the last 20!

haml and sass

I was sold on Sass from the first few minutes I used it. Sass lets you write CSS using a simplified abstraction format, and compiles your sass code into CSS. Best of all, it can be used without Rails (or Ruby), so I’ve been using it with static web pages as well. Here’s an excellent example from the sass web site:

Haml does the same for HTML. It took me a little longer to get used to, probably because it’s actually a replacement for HTML and Embedded Ruby (ERB). Haml really cuts down on the amount of typing needed to generate HTML, auto-closes tags (based on indentation), and makes it far easier to see the structure of your document. This snapshot from the haml page is a great demonstration:

friendly_id

This extends Rails’ RESTful resources by making URLs look “friendlier”, using a user-specified attribute of a model instead of the auto-generated numeric ID. In other words, by simply adding a statement like has_friendly_id :name to a users model, friendly_id converts URLs from http://my.site.com/users/17 into the much nicer http://my.site.com/users/mike.

Authlogic

This is the leading user authentication framework for Rails. It you need to allow users to register, sign in, change passwords, use OpenID, user LDAP, etc., this is the plug-in for you. It takes some time to learn how to integrate it, since each web site’s implementation is going to be a little different.

mislav-will_paginate

This makes it dead simple to take a model with many records, and display it in pages, where you can control how many are displayed per page, and the style of the page links:

thoughtbot-paperclip

I’ve researched and tried many file upload/attachment gems but Paperclip is the one I settled on. It seems to be the most actively maintained, and one of the most flexible. File uploading is still not as easy as it should be, especially if you want to provide feedback during upload (usually via a Flash plugin) or allow multiple attachments to a model (usually with an associated polymorphic upload model). Paperclip doesn’t do these things out of the box, but it’s possible to wrangle it into submission…

unobtrusive_date_picker

These days there’s no reason to make your users select a month, day, and year from three separate drop-down boxes, or type a date in some pre-determined format. This plug-in automagically adds a pop-up calendar to your date selection input fields.

jRails

When I started learning Javascript a few years ago, it was a huge pain in the neck. I quickly came across Prototype, which made my life much easier. Before I got too far along with that however, I found jQuery and fell instantly in love. This was clearly the way Javascript programming was meant to be. I used it for everything. Then last year when I started learning Rails, I was a little disappointed to find that the javascript library built-in to Rails was Prototype. Fortunately, others apparently had the same complaint, and created JRails, which integrates jQuery with Rails.

Others

There are a few other gems and plugins I use, but not as frequently. They include: Maruku, acts_as_audited, mechanize, and hpricot.

Am I missing out on any must-have gems or plug-ins? Let me know in the comments!

I also have a new iPhone, and downloaded a great free application that uses the GPS to record your bike rides and map them on Google Maps. Below shows the route that was recorded yesterday when Kat and I rode over 21 miles (round trip) to Leesburg and back on the W&OD trail. We kept our pace brisk, and it was a really good workout — almost 1,800 calories for me according to the bike computer. I’ve now ridden around 100 miles total, and Kat’s gone further since she’s done some biking trips while I’ve been at work. She’s been logging our efforts in an online document here.

W&OD from Rt. 28 to Leesburg and back

I also rode to work last Monday, which was a lot of fun, but logistically complicated (backpack full of clothes, shower at work, etc.). It took me about 40 minutes to get to work, vs. the usual 15-20 when driving. But adding in all the prep time and shower time at work makes it more like 60, so 3-4 times as long. I’ll probably do it occasionally, but I don’t think it’ll become my primary way of getting to work.

I’m really enjoying biking, and am glad that we decided to get bikes this year. There are a lot of bike trails in Virginia, so we’ll probably find a way to start exploring more of them.

Today we left the car in the garage and rode from the house to my office in Herndon. I’d been toying with the idea of biking to work occasionally, but Kathie had the good idea of trying it together during a weekend first. It was 7.1 miles each way, and surprisingly almost all of it was on residential roads, the Fairfax County Parkway Trail (really just a wide sidewalk along the parkway), and the W&OD. There’s also a short jaunt through the woods at the end of our street, a 100-yard path that saves 1.5 miles and eliminates “roads you’d be crazy to bike on” like Seneca Road, Georgetown Pike, and Rt. 7.

The last mile of the trip, on Van Buren St. was more of a challenge, since we had to choose between the sidewalk or the road with no shoulder. We tried both, and while the road was fine on a Saturday morning at 9am, I’m not sure if I want to do that during rush hour on a weekday. Fortunately the speed limit on the road is 25mph and it’s aggressively enforced (don’t speed in Herndon!). Bicycles are allowed on sidewalks in Virginia (yield to pedestrians) so I’ll have to try both. It was a fun morning, and we’re both looking forward to a lot more biking!