Ignorant Mouth » Environment

Turn Off Your Taps if you Want, But There’s a Bigger Leak

mwilson — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 18:06:42 +0000

I was interested – although not surprised – to learn that municipailities leak large amounts of their treated water - sometimes as much as 40%. According to the CBC, that amounted to more than 26 billion (said in a Dr. Evil voice) litres of drinking water. Industry-wide, losing 10% of the total is considered “acceptable” – I have no idea whether Ottawa’s number falls within that amount.

I’m on well water – if I have a leak in one of my pipes, I can empty my well and ruin it within a day. I get that we’re talking about clean water that returns to rivers and gets processed again, but it really irks me that while this is happening they’re airing commercials telling us to turn off our taps while we brush our teeth and avoid watering our lawns in order to preserve water. Sounds a bit contradictory to me – we can make all kinds of tiny changes until we’re blue in the face, but at what point do we get to take responsibility for the huge overall problem?

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Can You Save the World by Eating Less Meat?

mwilson — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 01:29:57 +0000

We’ve gone over three weeks with no fast food in our household, and have noticed some dramatic changes. For one, we’re spending less time fighting wicked cravings for Big Macs – whatever they put in that sauce makes you want to indulge. Second, we’re far less interested in sugary drinks and snacks like coke and chips. The longer we eat fresh food prepared by us, the more money we save and the healthier we feel. (Doesn’t it make you wonder how all those chemicals affect your body?)

photo credit: greg westfall.

We’ve been eating far fewer portions of meat compared to before, and have been seeing benefit to that, too. I am by no means suggesting that people should go without meat if they enjoy it, but reducing comsumption brings about serious benefits.

Consider how that hamburger is produced:

Petroleum-based chemicals are sprayed on farmland in order to yield grain crops
The majority of our farmland is used to produce feed for meat animals
The average cow is slaughtered at 21 months – that means 21 months of eating grains and corn which may have otherwise fed people; 21 months of producing CO2 and methane greenhouse gas emissions
The cow is transported by truck to slaughterhouse
The cow is slaughtered and transported by truck to processing
Once processed, beef is trucked to grocery stores, restaurants, etc for consumption

Without being scientific about it, every time we bite into that Big Mac, we pollute as much as we would if we were driving an SUV on the highway each day. By some estimates, the meat industry causes more emissions than the entire transportation system.

In our household, meat won’t be eliminated from our diet any time soon. Nor does the environmental aspect of the problem hit close enough to home to cause a cutback. Instead, we’ve embraced the healthy feeling we get from consuming more fruits, nuts and vegetables; it feels more pure, somehow.

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How To Stop Your Home’s Electrical Leakage

mwilson — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 01:45:41 +0000

Standby power, also known as vampire power, phantom load or leaking electricity, is the electricity used by appliances in your home when they are “off”. Even if you turn off all of your lights, unplug your fridge, and turn off your furnace, your electricity meter will continue to spin.

photo credit: lisa cee

Some key offenders are television sets and DVD players (they’re always “watching” for signal from your remote control) and computers (the BIOS remains powered up and keeps the clock charged even when the machine is off) stoves (if they have a clock). Standby power is irritating because it often exists for no other reason than to wait for your input during the times when you’re not around.

The best advice I can give is: have all of your devices on a good power strip. First, you get surge protection which will extend the life of your electronics. More importantly, you can unplug everything all at once. Just switching off the power bar won’t do the trick because the surge protection will remain charged in order to prevent damage to any connected components during a line spike.

Sometimes you may not want to unplug everything. For example, some cable receivers take several hours to rebuild their libraries after a power outage – you may decide to unplug many but not all devices. There are all sorts of different power bars on the market that accommodate one or two “always on” plugs, allowing you to disconnect the rest of the outlets manually or with a timer.

While the amount of electricity used by standby power may seem small in the scheme of things, we’ve already shown that small efforts add up to big changes. Cutting out that tiny amount of waste may not seem like the ticket out of an energy crisis, but why waste unnecessarily?

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Family in England Reduces Garbage to One Bag a Year

dwilson — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 04:16:58 +0000

This video clip was interesting. One family in England has managed to reduce the amount of household trash they dispose of to just one bag a year. To do this they focus on purchasing products that are recyclable, and making sure they they have used every opportunity available in their community to recycle as much as possible. I’m sure many of us could be inspired by this example, however many of these services are not available in every community. However, the message here is not to try to replicate this family’s antics, but to just keep in mind this example and do your best to increase your contribution to the environment. Even turning off the lights when you are not using them is better than nothing.

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The King of Pop Passes Away – Everything Else Stops?

mwilson — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:50:01 +0000

photo credit: Current News Stories

The American media in particular takes a lot of flak about it’s worship of celebrities when the rest of the world is just as obsessed (I’m thinking in particular of the tabloid journalists in the UK and their constant hounding of royalty, Lily Allen, etc). When Twitter is the most “reliable” source of actual news, I am very worried. (Note: I’m talking about during the week here. It’s a well-known fact that nothing newsworthy happens on weekends).

I was very disappointed to go to the home page of one of my primary news sources today (CBC News) and find not one but six prominent features (four with photos!) about Michael Jackson’s passing. One headline near the top of the page talked about the protests in Iran. No coverage on Congress’ 219-212 passing of the significant American Clean Energy and Security Act!

The BBC (aka world’s best news) was better, but not by much: Their home page was adorned with Michael Jackson’s image only once, above all other news. The US Congress was at position #2. Iran was conspicuously absent.

While Michael Jackson’s passing is of importance to a great number of people, using his image to push print is irresponsible opportunism in a world where clear leadership and strong journalism is needed more than ever. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be reported – I’m saying it should be part of the day’s news rather than all of the day’s news.

“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt

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Google Cuts Emissions Using Goats

mwilson — Sat, 02 May 2009 03:44:17 +0000

photo credit: Ivy Dawned

Rather than have their regular maintenance crew come by and clean up their lawn, Google has decided to employ an army of goats instead. No kidding (a-hem). The goats will eat and then fertilize the grass, and not use an ounce of gasoline to do so.

PETA was reached for comment – in principle they approve of Google’s move, but have concerns about how the goats are treated (protected from the rain, given veterinary care) and humanely transported.

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Britain’s Only Wind Turbine Plant Closes

mwilson — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:43:15 +0000

photo credit: Caveman 92223

Wind turbines have been in the news quite a lot lately. They seem like the ideal power generator – they don’t destroy water systems, they don’t generate pollution and they can be installed basically anywhere. Offshore wind farms are sometimes seen the solution for meeting North America’s electricity demands without requiring us to give up all of our farmland.

The downside to wind turbines is, of course, Wind Turbine Syndrome – adverse health effects reported by some people who live close to turbines. Apparently turbines generate a high-intensity, low-frequency sound wave that causes a gamut of problems running from abnormal heart rates to dizziness to crippling headaches. These health concerns are part of the reason it takes so long to build wind farms; although most people agree to the benefits of wind power in principal, they don’t want to live with construction in their own back yards.

The “not in my backyard” mentality is cited as the major reason why Britain’s only wind turbine plant is closing despite the announcement of new government spending for the construction of wind farms. At least for now, the delay in getting construction projects off the ground means too few orders to keep the factory’s 700 workers employed.

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German Company Turns Cellphones into Gold

mwilson — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:51:44 +0000

photo credit: covilha

Despite campaigns encouraging people to recycle their used cellular phones, most end up in landfills. In Germany, that amounts to 24 million phones per year – almost 1 for every 3 people. Aside from the obvious environmental harm caused by deteriorating batteries and plastic, the phones represent a significant economical waste – gold.

Hamburg-based company Norddeutsche Affinerie AG has made a business model out of recovering nearly 3.5 tons of gold out of electronic scrap waste, transforming it into gold bars worth over $110 million annually.

Resource-recovery is a growth industry in this poor economic climate; as more consumers get used to recycling their phones and other gadgets, more raw material can be extracted from the waste – reducing landfill clutter and providing resources for new technologies while reducing the need to strip the earth.

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Drink the Ocean

mwilson — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:58:04 +0000

As ideal as it sounds, moving to green energy involves a dizzyingly complex series of factors. We must reduce our consumption – we can’t expect to move our energy source from coal to wind and still keep turning on the television and flipping the light switch in the way in which we have grown accustomed. Big changes are coming and our way of life is necessarily going to scale back from the excesses of today. More awareness will come as part of the solution: I see a world where every citizen will be involved in the production of power in ways that have a low impact to the natural environment.

As we try to bring sustainable resources online, we will increasingly run into resource limits that will prevent us from building infrastructure. For example, solar cells require petroleum-based plastic but we’re running into the limit of our capacity to pump oil; we use natural gas to pump more oil but we are running out of that too (incidentally, many of us need natural gas in order to heat our homes in the winter!); we switch to water to increase the pressure of the oil but now it takes more energy to refine the oil while in the meantime we are running out of freshwater to drink. Resource chains like this will be present in all aspects of the ultimate solution.

Oasys Water has a promising solution for extracting drinkable water from the world’s oceans. The company has raised $10 million in venture capital to develop its desalinization technology that promises to greatly reduce electricity and fuel demands thus making it economical to purify ocean water for regular applications.

Expect to see more forward-thinking like this as the energy crunch worsens. Technology alone won’t help us with our resource problems, but when combined with conservation and awareness there is hope for a better future.

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Organic Wood

mwilson — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 10:28:46 +0000

I cut my own firewood; every fall we go into the woods, cut down some of our trees, haul them out for splitting and stacking so they can dry out over the winter and next summer and be burned the next year. Since the wood is properly stacked and seasoned, the creosote deposits in my chimney are minimal and the burn I get is complete – nothing is left of the wood but powder by the time I clean my wood stove.

According to a stranger we met some weeks ago, the care and process we take isn’t good enough. For them, only organic wood is fit to be burned. That threw me for a loop: I don’t spray chemicals on my trees, I don’t genetically modify them, I don’t burn green wood; I go into the forest and take what is already there naturally. How does one get more organic than that? After all, it isn’t like you can hydroponically grow tall maple trees.

I did an online search for “organic wood” and “what is organic wood” to no avail. The term comes up as a reference to certain types of jewelery, but I am still at a loss as to how someone can make “organic” firewood.

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