The Live Earth concerts are underway around the planet. They’re a way to raise the profile of the ecologically sustainable movement by mixing music and eco-friendly information to bring about a change in how we use the Earth’s resources. I’ll make it easy and capitalize Green to mean all the environmentally friendly things that you should consider. This is a string of posts, as the subject is fairly deep.
I’m not going to claim I’m all Green. The mere fact that I’m using the Internet means electricity has to be generated, computers had to be made, metals had to be mined, oil was drilled and petrochemicals were used to get to the point of me typing and posting. Nothing in modern life is ‘carbon-neutral’, no matter how hard we try.
It could even be argued that the mere act of dying and being buried is an affront to Mother Earth, as most of us have dental fillings that contain amalgam and mercury. Therefore our putrefaction is leaching heavy metals into the soil, contaminating groundwater and we won’t mention the problems with the casket, the phenolic glues that hold it together, steel nails that could have been recycled, varnishes made from petrochemicals. You get the idea.
Any concept, including Green, can be, to use the Latin, reductio ad absurdum: Reduced to absurdity. Which is exactly what I have done, with tongue only slightly in cheek, for purposes of illustration that any idea, even good ones, can be taken a little too far.
Green is a number of things. Small things, generally, but some big ones too. Most of them are not inconvenient, or even that terribly complex. Going Green consist of knowing three things.
1) Oil is a finite resource. We don’t know how much is left.
2) Food is important. If you don’t eat, you don’t shit. If you don’t shit, you die.
3) Stupidity and Hydrogen are two constants in the Universe and I’m not convinced about Hydrogen.
Working with those three core facts, you can look around at things that use up oil, or make our food less than good, or are stupid. Avoid those things and you will do good things for our continued existence on the planet.
As a personal experiment a few months ago, I counted up the number of plastic grocery bags I had in a cupboard. There were more than 150, made from Low Density Polyethylene, or LDPE. Designed to be single use, I was struck that it was a waste of oil, energy, time, money and effort For $1.98 I bought two of those ‘bring your own’ Recycling Federation of Ontario permanent grocery bags.
I keep one in the apartment and one in the car as I most often get groceries on the way home from work, so having a bag in the car makes sense. When I bring the groceries up, I hang the empty bag on the front door handle to remind me to take it back to the car the next day when I go to work. Automagically, the next time I need groceries, there is a bag in the car. It is so simple, even I can understand it.
How much oil have I saved? Oh, maybe a quart. How much energy have I saved? I have no idea. I do know that reducing the number of grocery bags that I have used would roughly measure the same as a skein of bags at your local supermarket. Or, a block of LDPE about two inches thick, 12 by 18 inches and weighs five pounds. Someone else can do the math.
Mississauga makes it easy to recycle household waste. You don’t even have to sort it. As long as there are no wet organics, the city will take all the paper, plastic and metal you can give. The city has provided each high rise tennant with a Blue Bag, again made from recycled stuff, to catch all the recyclables that we can take to the recycling room, instead of tossing them down the chute and off to the landfill. A couple of times a week, the city comes by and takes the accumulated recyclables of two hundred or so apartments and feeds it into the recycling stream.
Again, as a personal experiment, I’ve consciously not thrown paper, plastic or metals down the garbage chute next to Chez David. I throw out, in any two week period, perhaps one bag of legitimate wet organic garbage: Kitchen scraps, leftover spaghetti sauce, stale pretzels, tea bags and the stalks of romaine lettuce. The rest of it goes into the blue bag for recycling. I have to take that blue bag to the recycling room two or three times in any given two week period, as it is full of paper, plastic and other potentially recyclable stuff. By the way, all those accursed AOL CD’s are polycarbonate and are recyclable.
If there was a Green Box (meaning organic waste, compostable garbage) program for apartment buildings, then potentially I wouldn’t be sending more than a cup and half of material to a landfill in any two week period. I can understand why apartment buildings don’t do Green Box, as the accumulated wet organic garbage from 200 apartments would start to stink after a couple of days. Households, however, are a different story and Mississauga has a good Green Box system that produces compost for use in parks, by homeowners and sold retail.
Less garbage means less trucks hauling it to the landfill to bury it forever after a single use. The tradeoff is the energy and infrastructure it takes to pick up my recycling and turn it back into things, so it probably will net out the same. At least I’m getting multiple uses out of things I recycle, so it is an overall Green thing. Effort or thinking required? None to Less than None to separate recyclables from organics and reuse both as many times as you can.
We’ll keep going in the next post.
RoadDave 