8 weeks of clean living

Follwing up on my previous post, I took my old cell phone to the Apple Store and asked to recycle it earlier today. Unfortunately, the store employee I spoke to seemed to have no idea what I was talking about when I asked to turn in my phone. After going to the back to check whether he could take it, he returned saying, “Yeah, we do that; I can just take it.” I was able to give him my phone along with the charger, but I’m a little suspicious as to whether all of those items were actually taken back for recycling. In other words, despite the prominent recycling policy feature on Apple’s website, the rank and file employees do not seem to be aware of the program, leaving its efficacy in doubt.

Green Wombat has a couple of cool articles up concerning large-scale solar power projects. The first concerns a 500 MW plant being built in New Mexico with cooperation between San Diego Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison, among others. The article also mentions a 1.75 GW plant based on solar dish technology from Stirling Energy Systems. One drawback of these larger scale projects is that they are often located far away from the cities they supply, causing inefficiencies in the transmission of generated electricity.

In order to avoid these issues, Pacific Gas and Electric has two smaller projects up near the Bay Area in Fresno and Tracy. These projects should be able to supply power to Fresno and the Bay Area, respectively, without having to transmit over substantial distances. With all of the activity surrounding solar power from California’s major utilities and the abundance of potential solar energy in the region, it’s no surprise that San Diego and San Francisco/Berkeley are two of the Department of Energy’s 13 “Solar America Cities.”

These developments are good for someone like me who lives in attached housing, and therefore cannot easily generate individual solar power. Beyond conserving, the only other obvious option for reducing my in-home energy carbon footprint is purchasing carbon offsets, which are fairly controversial in terms of impact (and will no doubt be the subject of a future article).

The very first guest writer here at 8 weeks of clean living is my good friend Lauren. Lauren is about to start a PhD at UC Davis in the ecology department, with a focus on environmental policy. Hopefully she’ll be a recurring contributor, and to start she’s going to consider the environmental impact of bottled water.

Last time I dropped off my recycling at the local center there was someone ahead of me in line depositing a strikingly large number of empty plastic water bottles. As suggested by this thirsty person (or perhaps her thirsty clientele), bottled water has become a very popular drink choice. Unfortunately, it comes with its share of environmental problems. Purifying bottled water takes large amounts of energy, as does transporting full bottles thousands of miles to be sold. In addition, the fossil fuels required to produce enough plastic bottles to satisfy America’s annual demand for bottled water could fuel 100,000 cars for a year. Finally, once bottled water has been consumed, as few as 14 percent of the bottles get recycled.

Early this summer San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order banning the city government from using city funds to buy its employees bottled water. This is a smart way for the city, whose municipal water is readily drinkable, to save the approximately $500,000 it spends annually on bottled water and reduce its generation of waste, in addition to helping wean its city employees from bottled water. The city of Los Angeles has instituted a similar policy.

Anyone who lives in an area with safe water can make the switch from bottled water by acquiring a reusable, washable water container such as the environmentally friendly ones made by Klean Kanteen. I like to keep my bottle in the fridge–the cold water tastes better and I get the added refreshment factor. In places with suspect tap water, one can get a water filter that fits in the fridge. Switching from bottled water to tap water is an easy change to make that saves money, energy and the environment.

Alongside farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs can be a great way to acquire fresh local produce without much hassle or label checking. Most CSAs have a subscription-based structure where one commits to buying a box of produce each week over a certain time period from a community farm. Due to this subscription structure, CSAs make it easier for farmers to plant and grow an appropriate amount of each vegetable or fruit, avoiding some of the waste that can occur at farmers’ markets when a farmer miscalculates demand.

My local CSA is called Be Wise Ranch, located in the Santa Fe Valley approximately 20 miles north of San Diego. I’m signed up to receive a small box of vegetables every week, and this week’s box included onions, beans, carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, strawberries and zucchini. Since one doesn’t get to pick which vegetables are in the box each week, one is forced to find new and exciting recipes for the vegetables one doesn’t traditionally buy at the grocery store. For example, this zucchini soup recipe has been a big hit with me and my friends. Here’s a photo of some of my recent CSA acquisitions from Be Wise.

To find a CSA near you, check out this helpful tool over at Local Harvest. Many CSAs operate primarily through drop spots scattered throughout the communities that they serve. If there isn’t currently a drop spot near you, contact the farm and offer to set one up and manage it! The Be Wise drop spot that I currently use was started by an enterprising graduate student with an interest in local food (and he even receives a free box every week for his troubles).

One of the often overlooked benefits of the digital music era is its total elimination of packaging, storage media and physical transportation. CDs themselves are a pain in the ass to recycle, and standard jewel cases are not recyclable. Some effort has been made in the realm of packaging, as in the package for the recent Squarepusher album Hello Everything, which uses a fully biodegradable case, including the CD tray. Nevertheless, digital music avoids basically every environmental pitfall of traditional physical media music. Unfortunately, the vast majority of digital music has been hobbled by digital rights management (DRM) restrictions, which make the digital product less compelling than its physical counterpart by restricting where and how one can listen to one’s music.

There are a few great DRM-free music stores, but none of them currently carry any major label artists. Emusic is the largest, with an excellent selection of independent music across many genres. Bleep, developed by British electronica label Warp, also has a pretty good selection and includes the option to download CD-quality recordings (most digital music is compressed and therefore lower quality than what you’d find on a CD). Another DRM-free service that I have not tried is Magnatune (with the tagline “we are not evil”).

Recently, Apple’s iTunes Music Store started offering high-quality DRM-free downloads from EMI, the first major label to make DRM-free downloads available. (These DRM-free albums and tracks are advertised under the iTunes Plus moniker, so be careful: not all iTunes music is DRM-free.) Amazon is also planning to open a DRM-free music store with major-label participation later this year. If EMI’s experiment is a success, hopefully the other major labels will follow. Due to the environmental considerations outlined above, I intend to never buy a physical CD again (unless it’s used, I suppose) if it is available in a digital, DRM-free form. Hopefully all albums will be available in this format in the very near future.

I’m about to go on a fairly long road trip (around 450 miles each way), and I’m curious about how to maximize the efficiency of my trip. Obviously I could try something novel, like taking a train, but I’m swapping cars at the destination, so this one I have to drive. The most substantial change I’m going to make on this trip is to attempt to actually drive the speed limit. I’m going to be traveling several hundred miles on Interstate 5 in California, and traditionally I drive somewhere between 80 and 90 MPH. According to fueleconomy.gov, every 5 MPH one drives over 60 MPH is equivalent to paying $.20 extra per gallon of gas (and therefore using that much additional gas). So this time around I will try to maintain a steady 70 MPH during the trip. Incidentally, the ideal speed (in terms of energy use) is different from car to car and depends on several factors. There are tons of other ways to make driving more efficient, and I’m planning on making them the subject of an upcoming opinion piece (where I rant about the people who zoom out from behind me only to slam on their brakes at the stoplight 100 ft ahead).

I received a new toy in the mail on Tuesday: P3 International’s Kill A Watt. It is essentially a one outlet electricity meter that allows you to monitor the power consumption of any appliance. I’m planning on using it to calculate the real cost of activities like cooking and watching TV, and to get a better idea of how my energy use breaks down into different categories. For starters, I measured how many kilowatt hours (kWh) it takes to charge my MacBook from about 20% charge. According to the Kill A Watt, the MacBook required only 0.08 kWh to reach a full charge, costing me approximately a penny. Nevertheless, according to my most recent SDGE bill, I’m using approximately 270 kWh per month. Certainly the majority of that energy is wrapped up in my refrigerator, dishwasher, washing machine and dryer, but it will be interesting to see the supporting role that TVs, rice cookers and electric toothbrushes play.

I took the plunge and bought an iPhone a few days ago, and the now I have a scratched, dented, cracked and otherwise undesirable old cell phone in need of disposal. Old cell phones present a well-known and massive e-waste problem, so much so that a new law a recently went into effect in California requiring cell phone retailers to take back and recycle old cell phones and rechargeable batteries. Since Apple now sells cell phones, they have implemented a cell phone recycling program both by mail and at all of their retail stores (not just in California). You don’t have to buy anything from Apple in order to drop off your cell phone and you can also drop off old iPods. I’m not sure whether you can drop off cell phone chargers and other accessories, but I’ll try and find out when I drop off my phone.

One of the concepts that I imagine will turn up more than once in this blog is what I like to call a diseconomy of scale. I don’t mean it in the corporate sense, but rather in a personal sense where bigger is not necessarily better despite strong intuitions to the contrary. A simple example of this might be sodas at a movie theater. The base price for soda is very high and adding additional capacity to one’s soda is relatively inexpensive. Initially this seems like a simple economy of scale: the more soda one buys, the cheaper it is per ounce (and therefore the cheaper it is per unit of pleasurable drinking experience). However, other factors such as number of empty calories consumed and likelihood of having to run to the restroom during the climactic moments of the film are also increased when you spring for the extra $.30. Depending on one’s priorities and the rate of diminishing returns on the drinking pleasure, one might actually be paying more for a net negative, all things considered.

That said, I think housing decisions can often fall prey to fallacious economy of scale thinking. Presumably this is what leads to the often-mocked McMansion phenomenon. Illustrating an alternative to this kind of thinking, Inhabitat has a neat little article up listing their top five tiniest prefab homes. Obviously, as a house becomes smaller it takes much less energy to heat and cool it, light it, and less material to construct it, among other efficiencies. I want one!

The La Jolla Farmers’ Market is a great place to pick up some fresh local fruits and vegetables, as well as a surprisingly diverse array of knickknacks, jewelry and other curiosities. I hopped on the MTS Route 30 bus this morning to go grab some lunch and pick up some supplies for dinner.

My favorite place to go for lunch at the market is Belinda’s Cocina. Belinda has a wide array of really great Mexican food (the selection has expanded quite a bit over the last year), and—especially exciting for a vegetarian—she has the best chile rellenos I’ve found in San Diego. She also has containers of homemade salsa that you can purchase. Apparently her recipes have been catching on: she recently catered large gatherings at La Jolla Country Day School and Balboa Park, as well as several house parties in La Jolla. Unfortunately, Styrofoam containers are in pervasive use, so if you’re feeling environmentally minded bring your own plate.

Another great spot is the Petrou Foods booth, selling what Mr. Petrou claims to be the best olive oil and balsamic vinegar in the world. He says that the quality is a result of his long aging process and the fact that Temecula (where his olives are grown) gets “326 days of sunshine a year.” I picked up another bottle of balsamic vinegar to shore up my dwindling supply.

After having lunch at Belinda’s I came home with the aforementioned balsamic vinegar, as well as some fresh pasta from Peggy’s Pasta, a mini ciabatta, two apples, an onion, some Cremini mushrooms, fresh Parmesan and an olive spread that goes perfectly with the ciabatta. To see the rest of the pictures I took, check out my La Jolla Farmers’ Market photoset on Flickr. If you live in the area, you owe it to yourself to check it out!