Green Options

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Greenpeace recently released their quarterly guide entitled The Guide to Greener Electronics.

What’s the guide all about? In Greenpeace’s words:

“The Greener Electronics Guide is our way of getting the electronics industry to face up to the problem of e-waste. We want manufacturers to get rid of harmful chemicals in their products. We want to see an end to the stories of unprotected child labourers scavenging mountains of cast-off gadgets created by society’s gizmo-loving ways.”

Nintendo came bottom of the league with no public policy on toxics elimination or recycling. And although the guide describes the behaviour of electronics giants regarding toxic waste, energy usage is not taken into account – something I want to discuss here.

Here at Eat. Drink. Better. we talk a lot about the process through which food moves from farm to market to plate. But responsible food consumption includes accountability for the manner in which food scraps are disposed. It’s all well and good to have a backyard composter if your property includes some green space or even a balcony, but what about apartment dwellers?

I was intrigued by this couple after they appeared on Oprah Wednesday, February 27. I know it’s been over a week. Did you really think I caught the episode on Oprah? I heard about this from a friend who never misses the show. Honestly! OK, I watch it sometimes.

Daniel Burt is an eye doctor and his wife Amanda is a civil engineer living in Nashville. Their hobbies include living a lifestyle that makes a statement against rampant overconsumption and wastefulness in America. In other words, they dive in dumpsters to redeem things that have been thrown away.

Daniel explains, “We try to live very simply, and we don’t spend a lot on ourselves. We are very happy with having a little. We like to make it a priority to share a lot of our money. A lot of that comes from our Christian values of sharing and generosity.”

My “I’m a Californian, so what could I learn about recycling from Korea?” attitude was shattered on my first day in Seoul. It happened innocently enough. I just dipped into a corner store and was drop-jawed at what I found out: every food store in Korea has customer recycling and compost bins.

In fact, homes and businesses all over Korea recycle and compost as a general rule. More than 40% of solid waste is recycled and about 55% of food waste is composted as fertilizer and feed. Still, the recycling laws behind these successes are only part of the puzzle. Koreans, it seems, don’t fully appreciate their country’s recycling system; and it’s hurting recycling efforts.

Many believe that recycling and compost is either burned, buried, or dumped at sea. In fact, this is a common skepticism the world over that’s preventing better recycling. Despite growing up watching Mr. Rogers on TV visiting and explaining recycling plants (come on… we all think Mr. Rogers is cool, right?), too many people secretly suspect that their separated recycling and waste all gets burned or buried together in the end.

One of the most viable solutions to our large-scale environmental challenges is to use “waste” instead of virgin materials. This is especially true for the transportation fuels industry. Unfortunately, with the current infrastructure in place, virgin resources can actually be more cost effective than “waste.” I became aware of this when I toured the Coskata ethanol laboratory in suburban Chicago. I discovered that there is a cheaper and more consistent supply of harvested trees to produce ethanol than trash.

Trees, agricultural waste, storm debris and trash are all viable fuel sources for ethanol, using the Coskata process. This highly flexible technology allows future manufacturing plants to cater to locally available materials, making ethanol viable in parts of the globe that would not use corn or sugar cane for fuel. Argonne National Laboratory tests show that greenhouse gas emissions are up to 84% lower for Coskta ethanol than conventional gasoline. It has a net energy balance of up to 7.7, compared to 1.3 for corn-based ethanol. These results were achieved with a production cost of $1 a gallon when timber was used as an ethanol fuel source.

On face of it, you would think that garbage would be the cheapest way to produce fuel, given the flexibility of the Coskata process. In fact, one of the most available and economically viable fuel sources is trees, with the low price tag of $50 a ton. There is a very efficient infrastructure for harvesting and transporting trees. They are available throughout the year, unlike some agricultural products. It is actually cheaper to use trees than sorted garbage and agricultural waste.

Where does much of the world’s plastic trash end up? It ends up in a floating, Pacific gyre of “garbage soup” that’s now twice as large as the continental U.S. If the image of the jellyfish [...]

Recycling may be the easiest way to do your part when it comes to being “green,” right? Well, it does seem that a few trashcans around the house and conditioning oneself to differentiate throw-a-ways based on that ubiquitous chasing arrows logo is an easy way to get started and do some good, but are you really helping? Does that logo really mean what most people think it means (this is recyclable)? Chances are only some of the plastic containers you throw out are actually being recycled, and the rest are being pulled from the stream and discarded in the landfill.

This is the case in my current “hometown,” New York City. I spoke with the Director of the NYC bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse and Recycling a couple weeks ago while doing some research for a client, and he informed me that if I throw, for example, a plastic sandwich container, top of a tic-tac container or any other non-typical plastic container into my municipal recycling stream it won’t get recycled. Why? Well, the infrastructure is just not there yet; currently the only plastic containers that NYC will recycle are plastic bottles and jugs where the neck is smaller than the body. According to the NYCWasteLe$$ website, this is because 90% of all plastic bottles and jugs are made of #1 PETE and #2 HDPE, two plastics with strong market demand. Other less popular plastics can contaminate the batch of recycled plastic. This was news to me, as I had been dropping anything plastic that contained the mobius loop into my recycling bin, and I had been encouraging my roommates to do the same.

So here’s the rub:
Since the recycling logo isn’t a government-mandated symbol, manufacturers are allowed to put it on their products even if that product is only recyclable in some places. The mobius loop or chasing arrows logo along with resin codes (e.g. 1 for PETE), which were developed by the Society of the Plastic Industry, only denote the type of plastic and not its recyclability. As more and more companies are forced to outfit their products or packaging with something “green,” ill-informed consumers will continue to drop those products into their municipal recycling streams; thus increasing the man power needed to pull them out of the stream before the recycling process begins and ship them to the landfill, using more energy than if they had just thrown it in the trash. Like The Big Lebowski said, “That’s a bummer man.”

The Apple iPhone — the geeks very own messiah — has been the hot topic of conversation the world over. Geeks and lay men and women have all been gathering around the proverbial water-cooler with one thing on their mind (two if you include Britney Spears). But the water-cooler at Greenpeace has not been yielding the same happy vibes as Apple would have hoped.

September of 2006 saw Greenpeace launch the

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Are you a green music pirate? (ARRR!) Free music downloading has generated a lot of debate, with some artists for and others against it. Well, here’s a positive note for all you lyrical plunderers: downloading music is more environmentally friendly than buying it on CD. But you don’t have to be scurvy about it either: these days, it’s arguably much easier (and cheaper) to buy your music fair and square on iTunes than it

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The entire idea of the "commute" would seem ridiculous in an earlier time. People didn’t live 100 miles from where they worked. With the introduction of a large nationwide highway system and the availability of cheaper cars, the commute was born. People flush with money from the GI bill and savings from the hard times of WW2 moved en masse to new "suburbs." Planned cities where everyone got a small

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Many of us are working to green our home lives but it is important to bring that green initiative to the workplace as well. Offices generate tons and tons of waste everyday.

The often forgotten first step in any greening process is to reduce the amount of waste generated. Remember reduce, reuse, recycle? Recycling is the last step. Try this: gather up a few of your co-workers from

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