You spend lots of time at work every day. Rewarding yourself with a beautiful, health inducing, sustainable sanctuary to rest your weary head is just what the doctor ordered. Your bedroom is a place for relaxing, playing, stretching, and… oh yeah, sleeping.  You need 7-9 hours of sleep a night to be rested, healthy, and fit for the next day’s adventures. Less than that and you become sleep deprived, a condition that can lead to lots of health issues including: obesity, depression, heart disease, high blood pressure, and stroke. But it isn’t just the hours of sleep that make a difference between a good and bad night’s sleep – the quality of the sleep is influenced by environmental factors, comfort, and your circadian rhythm.  So how can you transform your sanctuary to be a calm, restful, healthy space?

First, Set the Stage:

Add Some (But Not Too Much) Color: Adding tones of quiet pinks, indigos and green-blues induces calm and relaxation while releasing creativity. Painting two-three walls white or off-white and adding a bit of diversity by painting one-two walls a restful color (see chart) can help to create a peaceful mood.

Keeping toxins out of your bedroom is key. To reduce your exposure while painting, use low-to no-VOC [Volatile Organic Compounds] paints and open the windows to provide good ventilation.  Also, let the paint cure for one-two days before sleeping in the room. There are many low- to no-VOC paints available ranging from water based, to clay, lime, or milk.

Then Add Some Light: Waking up to sunshine streaming through your windows is the best thing for a great day. The gradual lightening of your room as the sunrises brings you naturally awake. But what about in the short days of winter? You can mimic the natural rhythm of the sun with a clock that ‘resets’ the sunrise in time with your alarm to nudge you awake before the bells ring!

Sunlight has natural antibacterial properties that can help keep your room healthy just by streaming in the window so open up those blinds and curtains while you are at work.

Nighttime bedroom light levels should be soft and peaceful but flexible enough to help you find your socks in the morning-that is where dimmers come in very handy. Installing dimmer controls for recessed ceiling lights allows you to set the mood.  In today’s lighting vernacular, that soft, warm light will come from light bulb with a color temperature of around 2700 Kelvin. Recommended lighting levels for general lighting are 230-270 lumens (about 4 watt LEDs) and 450-500 lumens for task or reading lamps (about 5-6 watt LEDs).

Then Add Fresh Air: Ventilation and fresh air are important for a good night’s sleep and for keeping your bedroom from becoming stuffy and, heaven forefend, moldy and dank. The best air freshener is fresh air so open your windows at least once a week – even in winter – and air the place out. If you can, sleep with the windows open. Do not use air freshener sprays, solids, or plug-in’s as these add pollutants to the air that cause bronchial congestion and many contain phthalates which can cause: birth defects, reduced testosterone, liver and kidney toxicity, allergies and asthma, and cancer.

Adding plants will not only enliven the room, they – just by looking at them – help to reduce stress and lower blood pressure, and they will help clean the air and provide oxygen. NASA studied the best plants for cleaning/ oxygenating indoor air.

Installing and using a ceiling fan helps to keep the air moving and increase comfort levels but be careful to place it so it points down toward the bottom of the bed, not at your head, to avoid annoying drafts and breezes while you sleep.

Next, Reduce the Clutter: Think about what you need in your bedroom: A bed, places to put your clothes, maybe a comfy chair, a bedside table and a lamp. Look around at all the other stuff you have in the room. Do you need it? Does it help you to be calm? If not, find it a new home in a closet or a resale shop.

And Keep the Dust at Bay: A little disgusting but dust mites love to eat dust, flaked off skin, shed hair, and other detritus and then they digest and leave excrement – it is the later that we breathe in and are often allergic to.  Yuck! The best way to combat these buggers is cleaning. 

Now that we decluttered, dusting is a breeze. Use electrostatic cloths and the dust will be trapped on the cloth until you shake it outside and wash it. Avoid using any polishes or oils as they can add toxins to the air.  And then do the floors twice a week with your HEPA filter vacuum.

Once a week wash your linens and if you can, hang them out to dry for an antimicrobial sun bath and then finish them in the dryer to soften them up.

Second, Make A Comfy, Cozy Bed:

Start With Your Pillows: You spend about 33% of your life sleeping so you deserve the very best pillow possible. Choosing a pillow filled with certified organic cotton or pure grown wool, or a mixture of the two all encased in a certified organic cotton cover ensures that there are no residual chemicals or pesticides in your pillow.  Replace your pillows every few years.

Then Your Sheets, Pillowcases and Duvet Cover: Splurge on a new set of sheets that are certified organic cotton (make sure the label says certified otherwise the cotton field may have been sprayed with noxious chemicals) and are unbleached and undyed. Avoid cotton/poly blends because the polyester contains formaldehyde which is a chemical known to cause immunological problems and cancer. It can also cause: insomnia, respiratory issues, headaches, excessive thirst, coughing and watery eyes. 

And Blankets: Avoid synthetic fibers and choose certified organic cotton or pure grown wool to avoid chemical finishers, flame retarding additives, and pesticides.

Take a Look at Your Mattress: This is an expensive item. If it is looking a little down in the heels, you should consider replacing it but if it is comfy and in good shape then maybe give it a spritz to freshen it or cover it with a pillow top:

Step 1: Spritz with your homemade lavender spray – 1/2c filtered water mixed with 2-4 drops of pure lavender essential oil. Shake well and then finely spritz the mattress for an antiviral, antibiotic treatment. Let this dry completely before remaking the bed.

Step 2: Top your older mattress with an organic mattress pad or a tufted lamb’s wool under blanket or pillow top like the OMI Wooly Lite.  Make sure the mattress topper you select does NOT contain: synthetic chemicals, flame retardants, mothproofing or synthetic foam.

Step 3: Replace your worn-out mattress with one constructed with certified organic cotton or pure grow wool (naturally flame-resistant), or, if you are not allergic, 100% pure or natural latex. Also make sure to select a mattress that has no added flame retarding chemicals.

Shockingly, most mattresses are made of a toxic soup of chemicals including: formaldehyde, polyurethane, polyvinyl chloride, benzene, the flame retarding, bio-accumulative Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) and chlorinated Tris (TDCPP). These chemicals emit VOCs and off gas overtime and have been linked to: hormone disruption, behavioral changes, fetal malformations, learning and memory impairment, delayed puberty onset, respiratory problems, neurotoxicity and cancer, many contain phthalates that affect the reproductive system.

When shopping for a chemical free mattress look for the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) label or, if shopping for a latex mattress, the Global Organic Latex Standard (GOLS) label.  The GOTS label indicates that at least 95% of the materials are certified organic and that in the other 5%, chemicals such as flame retardants and polyurethane are prohibited.

Third, Furnish Your Tranquil Space:  

When shopping for bedroom furniture think comfortable, beautiful and practical but first think high quality with no VOCs, toxic glues, particle board or noxious chemical stains and finishes.

When looking for floor treatments, think throw rugs instead of wall-to-wall. Throw rugs can be put outside for shaking and to be aired and they can easily be rolled up to vacuum the floor. If you must have wall-to-wall, choose carpet squares from Interface or Flor. These are non-toxic and can be sent back to the manufacturer for recycling at end of life.

Fourth, Rest Yourself:

Reduce Your Exposure to Electromagnetic Radiation: Electronic devices have become part of our lives but we don’t have to sleep with them. Each device that is plugged in and charging emits an electromagnetic field that interferes with sleep patterns. If you must have your phone charging in your room, move it and its plug at least 4’ away to the side or toward the foot of the bed – a great outcome will be that you might never sleep through your alarm again because you have to get up to run it off. Also, try to reduce the amount of electrical appliances in your bedroom and unplug the ones that are there when you are not using them.

Kill the Blue Screen: Even APPLE with its new red-orange night time screen recognizes the ill effect that the blue light from the LCD screens of our phones, tablet readers and iPads, and computers has on our circadian rhythms and sleep patterns. In the best world you would put the phone away 2-3 hours before going to bed to encourage your melatonin levels to move back to normal. At least put the phone at least 4’ away and place it face down with the sound off or on very low when you go to sleep to limit disturbance and move its EMR field away from you.  Oh, and use an old-fashioned wind up or battery-operated alarm clock to help you wake up from your sound sleep. Read More: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-has-a-dark-side

After you wake up from your restful sleep, stretch and get ready because next we tackle the kitchen.

Eight years in and the meadow is settling into itself with a variety of textures, colors and forms that change with the season and the light. Many creatures have made it their home including: Deer, at least one Heron, Bluebirds, Swallows, Carolina Wrens, Cardinals, Robins, Groundhogs, Field Rats, Voles, Mice, Snakes, Rabbits, a passing Coyote, Foxes, Red Tailed Hawks, Yellow Finches, Owls, and many, many butterflies, caterpillars, beetles, bees, and other creatures. These creatures make the meadow a more active place by adding sights and sounds and make it a healthier place by redistributing plants through seed dispersal, pollination, and, in the case of the deer, crashing about aerating the soil with their hooves, dispersing seed, and breaking up the winter dried grasses into mulch.

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The dead of winter is usually a great time to sit in the library and plan for spring planting. This year though, the seeds were planned, ordered and distributed in the meadow back in September so that they would be able to get themselves settled before winter. We have experimented in the meadow with many different native seeds – some require fall planting to get started and some wait, requiring a period of cold (stratification) to get their start in life. I have found that fall is the best time to achieve a high success rate because of reliable rainfall, warm and resilient soil, and mature surrounding plants to dampen the effect of drying winds. The lower meadow is well stocked now with established grasses and flowers but the mid and upper-slope areas remain sparse. This we attribute mostly to the drying west winds. To counter this, we have been slowly extending the hedgerow from the forest edge across the north edge of the meadow – even in winter, this is helping to divert the onslaught of the wind. As you can see in the picture on the right, a hedgerow has a number of other benefits for the land and creatures beyond just diverting wind.

The meadow’s hedgerow is a mix of naturally occurring cherry that we are coppicing to encourage lateral branching and wild blackberry that we are training onto the cherry branches. It has also been planted in layers with Hawthorn, Serviceberry, and Staghorn Sumac to provide a wind break, deer barrier, food source for birds and other creatures (including foraging humans), and nesting areas/habitat for birds and other creatures. Both roses and blackberries are members of the Rosaceae family and we are using a rose training trick that we learned from a British gardener on Instagram that seems to increase blackberry yield and encourage denser growth (in roses it increases flowering and hip formation). Cherry, Hawthorn and Serviceberry are also members of the Rosaceae family but they seem to prefer their natural branching pattern to being trained like a vine. This fall we plan to add 15 more feet to the hedge.

The fall overseeding added 6 pounds of Ernst Conservation Seeds’ Showy Northeast Native Wildflower Mix to the upper meadow. For best results, Ernst recommends that this mix be seeded at a rate of 6-10 pounds per acre with a cover crop. The overseeding this year was limited to about 2 acres of the 5 and it was seeded into existing grasses so we fudged a little on the total amount to save money. We mixed the seed with untreated cat litter and hand placed it across the sparse areas. The cold came very early this year with snow and very low temperatures in early November. This was followed by a relatively balmy December, a cold January and a not too wintry February and March. Although this made for great weather to be outside, the lack of snow and rain resulted in dry soils and what proved to slow growing and blooming in the beginning of the growing season

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What I find interesting in winter is the details that come into sharper focus when there is not much else to look at. Noticing…

– how the sun warms the snow on the south side of the path leaving the crunchy north side to show the footprints of the various animals who have visited in the night – fox, deer, vole, mouse, possibly coyote and during the day – groundhog, heron, sparrow, and bluebird.

– how the Milkweed seeds cling to their protective husk and disperse when the stronger winds arrive. Common Milkweed has amazing survival strategies that allow it to develop new shoots while flowering and dispersing mature seeds throughout the growing season – many seeds persist through the winter and into early spring.

-how on early misty mornings, water droplets cling to seedheads and grasses catching sunlight and making everything sparkle.

-how deer beds steam in the cold air letting you count the number of families who had been sleeping in the shelter of the grasses. So far 10 is the most I have found on a single morning.

Winter is a time to let the meadow garden rest and prepare for spring but even as it sleeps it can be a pretty magical place.

https://greenbuildingunited.org/newsroom/recap-lbc-demonstration-project

The St.Peter’s Church Rector,Claire Nevin-Field, and I  recently sat down with Philadelphia’s Office of Sustainability to talk about all the wonderful sustainability steps that the church is taking to not only save money and have a healthier environment but to face climate change face on.  The goal? To protect all of God’s creation! Check out the OSS’s posting about our conversation: https://www.phila.gov/2019-09-16-one-sustainable-thing-st-peters-church/

Transforming PES: A Renewables Focused Energy and Resource Recovery Hub

The Philadelphia Energy Services site plan has to be deliberate (like a master plan but more like a coordinated effort that thinks sustainable and long term, anticipating changing technologies and environmental changes like ground and tidal river incursions), collaborative (with the impacted communities, city, state, and federal governments, workers, and the business community), and comprehensive (looking at the property as both a tremendous asset and as an environmental nightmare). Whether collaboratively crafted with a new Owner, with the existing Owners, or independently, done well, the plan can simultaneously solve multiple challenges facing the City:  Climate Change; Citywide waste disposition; Site resilience and clean-up; Job creation; and Job training.

To meet the challenges posed by a changing climate, the City has set a goal of decarbonization (80% decrease in carbon by 2050). Spending money or time to re-establish a ‘dirty’ energy hub flies in the face of that goal and runs counter to what is needed to address climate impacts; especially at this site. Rather, Philadelphia should work with a new Owner, with the existing Owners, or independently, to create a renewables focused energy and resource recovery hub that concentrates on energy recovery and material transformation from the City’s waste stream rather than the current processes that refine virgin or ground-stored sources. This hub would be a center for a new Circular Economy in Philadelphia – regarding waste as a valuable resource and input to new products and high-energy demand fuels.

While establishing the energy and resource recovery hub an aggressive, environmentally aware, workplan plan for real, substantial clean-up and long-term resilience, should be crafted and implemented. It is clear that the tried-and-true method of PADEP and EPA reports and tests is having limited impact on the pollution levels in the air, on the ground, in the ground water, or in the deep aquifer. A new paradigm needs to be developed that collaboratively devises and implements a phased, timely plan. Parties to this collaboration should at least include: the City; Evergreen; PES; Sunoco; PADEP; EPA; a remediation expert in partnership with the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society; and the AFL-CIO.  It should also include resiliency experts to craft and implement a plan to manage and reduce the effects of rising tidal water and ground water.

The energy and resource recovery hub should include:

The Jobs

• Instituting a large scale, net zero, decarbonization workforce training center that is jointly operated with the green community and the AFL-CIO to provide retraining based on existing, transferable skills, job placement, and education about issues including: life skills, climate issues, and the transition to a green energy economy. Establishing a joint program with the School District of Philadelphia for skills training.

The Site

• Changing the language used to describe the site from PES and refinery to green industrial park.
• Using and incorporating phytoremediation on the site for clean-up. Installing a buffer of trees and vegetation around the industrial park to incorporate beauty and to work as natural air filtration.
• Adopting GSI techniques throughout the site to manage stormwater and tidal/ground water inundation. Decommissioning portions of the water’s edge and installing a managed wetland to absorb flood waters.
• Installing a significant array of pollution sensors for air, soil, ground water, and deep aquifer monitoring that allows everyone and anyone to access real time data and track remediation efforts over time.
• Establishing an Industrial Park micro-grid that supplies all energy needs on the site using a mix of renewable energy sources including geothermal, fuel cell, solar and wind. Incorporate sensors to manage utilization.
• Requiring that all new and significantly renovated buildings on the site be built to net-zero energy standards.
• Installing Solar on all of the structures in the industrial park and structure the ownership as community solar for the surrounding neighborhood.
• Activating the site for City residents by opening up the river front and extend the Schuylkill River bike trail around the perimeter on a raised boardwalk.

Potential Businesses

• Expediting the permit applications for RNG’s digester plant that is slated for installation on the property. This facility is slated to process commercial, institutional, and industrial food waste in biodigesters to create two outputs: pipeline grade methane and compost. This food waste represents about 19% of Philadelphia’s total landfill bound waste; recovering it as resources will help the City reach its Net-Zero Waste
• Processing wood and other cellulose to create biodiesel and biochar, a high value soil amendment. This material represents about 20% of the City’s landfill bound waste.
• Installing a trash gasification plant on the site. The potential is almost limitless for the waste and fuel sides of the equation. Waste Management, the City’s current waste contractor, has a test gasification system in Pittsburgh that should be investigated. Although a ‘burning technology’ there are little to no emissions from this process.
  https://www.technologyreview.com/s/413606/converting-garbage-into-fuel/
• Considering processing low-and-high-value Plastics to recover oil and chemicals including: MLPs, polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride, polypropylene, and LDPE.

Transforming the PES to a green industrial park that is a renewables focused energy and resource Recovery Hub will benefit all Philadelphia residents now and into the future.

Last week, when I walked out to retrieve a few errant cans along the roadside, I ended up collecting a whopping 5 pounds, 10 ounces of litter – most of it recyclable. To see what might have accumulated in a weeks time I headed out with a trashbag and re-walked the road. Just before leaving I swapped the shopping bag that I had grabbed for a large trash bag.  Boy was I glad – I came back with 12 pounds, 12.6 ounces of mixed trash and recycling – from a road that I walked 7 days ago. WHAT!!!?

My friend Diane rightly points out that waste often falls out of trash trucks as they zoom along. Maybe some of this waste comes from the trucks but this mix of waste, and its distribution along the road, points to folk drinking (beer mostly), driving, and tossing their finished cans out onto the edge of a beautiful country road.

I have to ask WHY?? There are parts of the United States where recycling is non-existent but in this particular area there are regular trash and single stream recycling pick-ups.  There is a significant amount of messaging around how to manage waste. There is also a lot of energy around the social good of cleaning up the environment. This 12-pounds of waste is like a canary in the coal mine – an indicator of an environmental problem that we have direct responsibility for and have the ability to solve – immediately – before it gets out of control.  Consider changing the mantra from drink, drive, and toss, to drink, drive, and put back in the bag to dispose of later. It really is that easy.

So, what was in that 12 lbs, 12.6 oz? My backyard waste audit resulted in the following:

• About 3 lbs, 6 oz was non-recyclable landfill bound trash, all the rest (9 lbs, 6.5 oz) was recyclable.
• The recyclables included:
  • 2 lbs, 9.6 oz Aluminum Cans;
  • 5 lbs, 2.5 oz Glass;
  • 1 lb, 4.4 oz Plastic;
  • and 3.5 oz Thin Film Plastic.

Although they weighed less than the glass, the recyclable aluminum cans made up the largest volume of litter. As you can see from the pictured layout most of these cans were beer cans (all of the glass containers were for beer containers). I am not sure how many of you read your beer cans but brewers, maybe because they care, but more likely because of regulations, are looking to educate us by labeling the cans as recyclable.  Many even seem to embrace the Zero Waste movement by asking us to ‘Please Recycle’ or ‘Be Responsible and Recycle’.

Two brewers, The Plank Road Brewery with its Icehouse brew, and Voodoo Ranger, give recycling lip service; Voodoo at least includes the recycling symbol, Icehouse just reminds us that the can is made of ’Recyclable Aluminum’.

I am thinking that can manufacturers might consider adding sound effects as people drink that quietly repeat, “Hey, Don’t Litter!”, …. I suppose that they could add, “Don’t drink and drive” too, but I don’t want to be too preachy.

Manufacturers in many different industries are taking responsibility for their product’s end-of-life by developing biodegradable and compostable materials, setting up ways to return packaging (and the product itself) for reuse or re-manufacture, and improving packaging recyclability. Aluminum cans are almost infinitely recyclable but the scrap value is a little low ($0.34/pound today) to incentivize a litterer to not throw the can out the window. But what if the various brewers, or maybe a bigger brewer with a large marketing budget, installed can compacting collection units in selected beer sellers.  They could set up a frequent compactor program that rewards returns with points toward future purchase discounts or maybe the ability to donate to a local tree planting program or clean water action group.

In the meantime, I think I will consider a weekly walk along the quiet roadway a vital part of my exercise routine and hopefully, that bag I carry, will be empty every time I get back to the meadow. I think that the Vital IPA can says it best, “Taste Victory Responsibly, Please Recycle”.  Here’s to an Environmental Victory!

Earlier this week I noticed some aluminum cans along the road next to the Kennett Square Meadow.  Thinking that picking up roadside waste is a great way to get in my steps I grabbed a trash bag and started on a walk along the quiet country road. After about 20 minutes my bag started to get full. What at first looked to be only cans turned out to be a surprising mix of waste items.

I thought about tying up the bag and tossing it in a trash can but then thought, what a great opportunity for a waste audit! So, home it came to be sorted and weighed with our handy dandy kitchen scale. In all, the bag contained 5 pounds, 10 ounces of mixed waste!

So what was in that 5 pds, 10 oz? About 3 pds, 8 oz was recyclable in the single stream system, 5 oz could be recycled but it would take some work, 13.5 oz might be recyclable, and there was 15.4 oz of material that could only be designated landfill bound waste.On the way back to the meadow I glimpsed a little bit of green in the stream that cuts through the property.

8.0 oz Recyclable Aluminum Cans, 1.9 oz Non-recyclable Coffee Cups, 2 pds, 5.7 oz Recyclable Glass, 4.0 oz Recyclable With Difficulty Miscellaneous Plastic, 7.9 oz Recyclable Paper, 2.0 oz Recyclable Plastic, 13.5 oz Maybe Recyclable Rubber, 0.2 oz Recyclable With Difficulty Styrofoam, 0.8 oz Recyclable With Difficulty Snack Packaging, 0.5 oz Recyclable Thin Film Plastic, 13.5 oz Non-recyclable Miscellaneous Trash.

This particular mile long stretch of road has six houses dotted along it which means the trash along the road probably came from driver’s throwing their trash out the windows of their cars and pick-up trucks.

On the way back to the meadow, I glimpsed a little bit of green in the stream that cuts through the property. Closer inspection revealed that the green was an empty, recyclable, fertilizer bag that had become entangled in and frozen onto an underwater branch.  It was probably blown there from the road by the wind. I tried pulling and digging and poking it loose to no avail. The beautiful pristine stream is now showing a flag of litter until a thaw comes or until I don some waders and brave the icy depths to chop it out.

The Zero Waste movement has caught hold across the US with cities, including NY and Philadelphia, pledging to meet zero-waste and litter goals by educating citizens to reduce consumption, buy smarter, recycle right, and upcycle, and by incentivizing stores, manufacturers and delivery companies to use smarter packaging and start take-back programs.  Cities are also educating citizens to take responsibility for their own trash by disposing of it properly.

I can almost understand litter in a city where there are so many people and so much activity but out by the meadow I cannot understand anyone’s blatant disregard for other people, for nature, and for the health of the environment – that is what litter is all about – a selfish disregard for the rest of us. This 5 pds, 10 oz represents one, 20-minute walk, on one mile, of one back road. There are about 4.12 million miles of road in the US. If all of them were treated with equal disregard that could translate into a lot of litter.  Instead, let’s all of us commit to a zero-waste lifestyle and enjoy an un-littered world. In the meantime I have put the aluminum, glass, and paper in the recycling bin; taken the thin film plastic to the grocery store for recycling; have disposed of the landfill bound waste and am looking for a place to take the rubber pieces.

Your bathroom is probably the smallest, most utilitarian room in your house and, because of its complexity, may offer the most opportunities for making a sustainable impact.  Here are six ways to spruce up that bath while saving money, and reducing your environmental footprint:

Install LED lighting

Replacing your existing incandescent or compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs with LEDs (light-emitting diodes) will make your bathroom more energy efficient by reducing the amount of electricity needed to operate the lighting. As those kilowatt hours drop, your electricity bill will be lower and the demand for power from your electric generating plant will go down. Lower demand means less Green House Gasses (GHG) emitted. That means your carbon footprint is reduced.  High efficiency lighting also lasts longer reducing your overall lighting costs.

The best light for most bathroom tasks is daylight or bright/cool white.  Look for bulbs with the color temperature or Kelvin of 5000-6000K for Daylight and 3500-4100K for bright/cool white.  That said, I much prefer warm light for some activities like taking a bath, so I have at least one lamp outfitted with a Soft White 2700-3000K bulb.

Note: CFLs contain mercury and are therefore considered a hazardous waste and should be disposed of properly.

Ventilate Right

Part of living a sustainable lifestyle is having healthy indoor air quality (IAQ) that is free of mold and other toxins. Bathrooms are by their very nature all about moisture. By properly ventilating you can enjoy all that moisture and avoid the mold and mildew that may come with it. Regardless of whether your bathroom has an operable window, installing a high-efficiency bath fan set to automatically operate makes ventilation almost invisible to you and your guests and ensures that the system will be used.

There are many ways to make sure that the fan operates automatically but the two best may be setting the desired humidity and activating with an occupancy sensor that automatically turns off a few minutes after you leave the room.  If you go with a humidity sensor, optimal settings are: 35-40% relative humidity (RH) in winter and 40-50% for the rest of the year.

There are lots of fan options out there. To narrow the choices, I look for the following:

• First, I look for energy efficiency. Fans labeled with the EnergyStar rating demand about 60% less energy to operate.
• Then I look for a fan that exhausts to the outside. Many dumps the wet air right into your ceiling – that just moves the moisture problem to another location in your house.
• Then I look for a quiet fan. Look for the noise or sones rating on the box: 1.5-2.0 is quietish, 0.5-1.2 is very quiet.
• Then I check the fan’s flow capacity in cfm to match the room’s size to the fan size. Measure your bathroom. If it is less than 100 square feet (sf), then you want a fan that has 1 cfm for every square foot. If the room is bigger than 100sf you have to do some arithmetic: add 50 cfm for each toilet, bathtub, shower, and shower-bath combo and add 100 cfm for each whirlpool bath/ spa. The total is the required cfm for the space.

Use WaterSense Fixtures

Save water and lower your water footprint with WaterSense labelled fixtures. Between renovations, install low-flow aerators in the faucets, low-flow showerheads and offset the water in your toilet tank with a brick or a milk jug filled with water. If you are renovating, choose high-efficiency fixtures including an ultra-low-flow toilet. Not only will you save precious water, you will save money on water and sewer use charges and reduce costs for hot water.

Adopt Green Cleaning

Bathroom cleaning products are among the most toxic, chemically laden concoctions available. Not only are they hazardous to your skin and eyes, they are hazardous for you and your family to breathe in, sometimes affecting brain function and causing asthmatic reactions.  Luckily you can make your own, very effective, cleaning products and there are more and more commercially available, natural or organic products available. Read the labels and choose healthy IAQ. When cleaning, avoid paper towels. Instead use washable, electrostatic cloths to wipe, wash, and scrub your counters, sinks, floors, and walls. Checkout the GreenBeams Recipes to make your own cleaning products.

Choose Recycled

Reduce your environmental footprint by choosing paper products (toilet paper and tissues) made from and packaged in recycled paper.  Look to reduce  purchasing anything packaged in plastic- including hair products – and ACT UP – demand that your preferred manufacturers start take-back programs for their packaging or start offering refillable packaging or use biodegradable packaging. In the meantime, recycle your plastic, your toilet roll cores, your tissue boxes so that you reduce your waste-to-landfill footprint.

Wash Right

Wrapping yourself in a clean, fresh towel is the perfect end to a great shower or bath. When you wash your towels, choose cold water, choose environmentally aware detergent, ditch the fabric softener, and hang everything out to dry in the sun until almost dry.  Finish drying them in the dryer to soften the fabric but ditch the dryer sheets. Why?

• Dryer sheets not only pollute the outside air but the powders and chemicals stay on your fabrics making it very easy for you and your family to inhale them – use dryer balls instead.
• Your dryer uses more energy than any other appliance in the house – use it less, reduce your energy costs.
• Sunlight is a great germ killer – a sun dried towel is a healthier towel.
• Fabric softener is an unneeded extra chemical soup that persists in your fabrics. That ‘fresh scent’ is made up of high volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) that are causing air pollution in your home.
• Using environmentally aware cleaners reduces the toxic chemical load in your home and in the water treatment plant.
• Using cold water reduces the demand for heating hot water and gets your clothes just as clean as warm or hot water.

Now that you have sustainabilized your bath you can breathe in the fresh, clean, non-toxic air and be ready to tackle the bedroom…

PECO and Lutron helped us exorcise a phantom from an historic Philly church. I have always thought that many of the historic structures in the city were haunted by long ago Colonists. It had not occurred to me that they could be haunted by phantom electric until we, under a PECO incentive program, relamped – changed the lightbulbs from incandescent to LED – the Sanctuary and found that the lights would not turn off, even when the lighting controls were set to off. Instead, there was an eerie glow of ‘almost off’ lamps.

Over Ten years ago the church had installed a Lutron dimming control system to create beautiful lighting scenes to enhance services and, to save on consumption, had been diligent in turning the system off when the church is not in use. Turns out that the electrician who installed the system set the off-setting to a very, very low dim that kept the bulbs very warm to the touch but did not light them up.  The voltage being delivered was more than enough to light up the LEDs.

First step, shut the system off at the breakers. As the graph shows there was an immediate drop in demand.

Second step, call in the electricians to help reprogram the system so that off was truly off. Trying to program the older system that was installed before LED technology moved beyond little indicator lights, proved to be too specialized for them.

Third step, ask Lutron for help. Their customer service is exemplary.  The technician who troubleshooted the system was able to identify the issues with the original programming and develop a creative work around that allows the system to recognize and control the LEDs.

With the onset of earlier sunsets and the return of the choir for evening practices the demand curve has returned to its normal shape but it shifted down by 30% resulting in real dollar savings for the church. A quick estimate of the cost of that phantom is about $10,900 over the 10-year period – maybe not a lot in the big picture of things but significant in the life of a church. The good thing is that this phantom has been exorcised with the help of great partners.

Emboldened by this experience, the church is embarking on an ambitious Sustainability Plan that promises to root out other phantoms, drive down consumption, and find opportunities for savings across its campus. Follow their lead and exorcise the electricity phantoms in your life.

A faucet that drips once every second wastes over 3,000 gallons of water per year.  That’s enough for 180 showers.  That is a lot of water, and a lot of energy. Stop That Drip!