Green Options

If you were to click on my bio here for Sustainablog, you’d see that I started down this green path because my son who was six at the time had read about global warming and gave us the “what for” over the SUV we owned. We joke now with him that he was the one that got this whole thing started for our family, yet at times he seems, at almost ten years old, the least interested in the environment. In a way, that may be a good thing.

The Boston Globe reported that Climate change takes a mental toll, and that children and adults alike are starting to have “psychosis or anxiety disorders focused on climate change.” Children especially “are having nightmares about global-warming-related natural disasters.”

Back in the fall, I told you about the finalists in the X-Prize “What’s Your Crazy Green Idea?” contest, and urged you to go vote for one of the three finalists who were competing for the $25,000 prize. The X-Prize Foundation has announced the winners. They are Bryan Le and Kyle Good from Irvine, CA.

Their “Crazy Green Idea” to develop a new storage medium, an “ultra-capacitor,” generated the highest number of votes to be crowned

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Que the voice of Boris Karloff…

It was quarter past dawn…
All the Whos, still a-bed,
All the Whos, still a-snooze
When he packed up his sled,
Packed it up with their presents! The ribbons! The wrappings!
The tags! And the tinsel! The trimmings! The trappings!

When the Grinch stole Christmas, he not only stole the presents, he stole all the things that accompany Christmas that end up as waste. He  stole the ribbons, the wrappings, the tags, the tinsel, the trimmings, the trappings plus the Christmas trees and the food for the feast.

And what was the Grinch going to do with all that stuff he really didn’t want?

Three thousand feet up! Up the side of Mt. Crumpit,
He rode with his load to the tiptop to dump it!

Pretty much the same thing most of us have done in the past with all our Christmas leftovers, right? We dumped them. Not off the side of Mt. Crumpit, but in the trash.

This year, when we’ve got things leftover from Christmas, let’s be responsible with their disposal.

Have you been waiting for a green Christmas story for children? I found one. While perusing Barnes and Noble the other day I came across When Santa Turned Green by Victoria Perla.
Here’s the premise. Global warming is wreaking some havoc at Santa’s workshop. It’s causing a leak in the roof. Since Santa’s got a big in with the kids of the world, he calls on them to help him take action. The children in the story do small things like planting trees and packing their lunches in reusable containers. Santa starts using solar and wind power and wearing a Green Santa suit.

My first thought when I saw this book was, “ugh.” I don’t need something like this for my kids. They don’t need to be hit over the head with any more green-ness than I already clobber them with daily. But then I started reading some of the reviews from readers on various sites.

It’s common for bar and bat mitzvahs to have a theme, and the latest trend seems to be green for the reception following this Jewish right of passage ceremony. Haaretz.com reports that “scores of Jewish families are beginning to incorporate the [green] trend into their religious lives.”
The green them trend isn’t just for their environment, though. Going green helps

reclaim the significance of a rite of passage that has grown to emphasize the lavish party rather than the religious ritual.

The lavish parties might have changed focus, but their price tags can still remain steep. A green bar or bat mitzvah done by a professional planner in LA can run anywhere from $20,000 to $500,000. No, I didn’t add an extra zero there. Of course, those are professionally planned parties, and the price tag doesn’t need to be near that amount.

Kattler Kupetz, an LA green event planner, planned green bat mitzvahs three years ago for her twin daughters and now they have become half of her business. Some of the things she incorporates are:

On Tuesday, I wrote about the dip in demand for recyclable materials. Recyclables are piling up in warehouses, and as long as the economy continues to head in the direction it’s heading, demand probably won’t increase. It’s a problem. What’s the solution?

I’m not sure what the solution is in the grand scheme of things, but I know that I can contribute to a small part of the solution. I can step up the reduce and reuse part of reduce, reuse, recycle. If I produce less recyclables, and you produce less recyclables, it will help. It might not solve the entire problem, but it will help.

Here’s what I plan to do:

Before anyone starts screaming, “What, I thought I was supposed to recycle! This girl is crazy.” let me explain. I’m not advocating throwing recyclables in the trash to end up in a landfill. I’m talking about putting more focus on the first two parts of the environmentalist’s mantra - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve watched with perhaps a little too much pride as the pile of trash I’ve put out on Fridays has shrunk and the pile of recyclables I put out on Thursdays has grown. I have successfully reduced the amount of trash I generate. Recently I’ve realized that’s not enough. I need to now start reducing the amount of recycling I generate.

About a month ago, I started to see news reports stating that the demand for recyclables has dropped. The economic plunge has taken the recycling market off the cliff with it. According to an article on GreenBiz.com,

Consumers are buying fewer products made in China, and with fewer products being shipped overseas, there is a lesser need for boxes and packaging materials to move those items, according to The Journal of Commerce. Chinese producers, therefore, need fewer materials to make packaging and items.

“A lot of the material was going to China to make boxes for all the things they were shipping back to the United States,” Bruce Savage, spokesman for the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries in Washington, told the Sacramento Bee. “When they aren’t producing products, they don’t need the packaging materials.”

Last month, I did a little research to find out if I was breaking any “green laws” with my yearly real Christmas tree. It may seem counter-intuitive, but I discovered that many environmentalists are pro-real Christmas trees over artificial trees. Why is it considered more environmentally friendly to cut down trees than have an artificial tree that can be used year after year?

Most Christmas trees are grown on tree farms - they are considered an agricultural product. They are sustainable, and for each tree that is cut, at least one more tree is planted.
Tree farms are usually planted on soil that doesn’t support other types of agriculture.
In the US there are about 1 million acres dedicated to tree farming. Each acre provides enough oxygen for 18 people.

Last week I wrote a post about curbside composting programs that some cities have started. One of the benefits of keeping compostable food out of landfills, I wrote, is that it reduces landfill methane - a greenhouse gas that is 72% more powerful than carbon dioxide.

One of the readers, Dean, posed a question in the comments.

Does this actually reduce methane emissions? It seems, based on the lack of detail in the article, that the same amount of methane would be produced whether the organic waste was sitting in a compost pile or a landfill. Why wouldn’t that be true?

This is a good question, and I thought it deserved to be answered in a post instead of just a reply in the comments section.

This past spring, my family and I were able to get all the compost we needed for our vegetable garden from a local community’s compost pile at their department of public works. The compost was created from all of the leaves and yard clippings that had been collected curbside. Many communities collect leaves, clippings and other outside organic matter to turn into compost, but some communities are taking it a step further.

Cities such as San Francisco, Minneapolis, Toronto, and Boulder all have programs in place that allow residents to place food scraps curbside to be turned into compost.

Food that is mixed in with regular trash is estimated to make up about 40% of the trash in landfills. It also is the biggest offender in creating landfill methane which is a powerful greenhouse gas - 72 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Reducing landfill methane is just one of the benefits of keeping this type of waste out of landfills.

According to San Francisco’s environmental site