Brave New Leaf

Carbon Audit: Evaluating my Automobiles

Read other articles in the Carbon Audit Series: an ongoing investigation into our carbon footprint.

My husband and I own three cars. Yes, that’s right. Two people, three cars, 12 wheels, and 15 seats. Let’s just say that my husband has a hard time getting rid of things. Especially automobiles. He has a visceral emotional attachment to cars he has owned.

Let’s have a look at our automobile menagerie:

1.  1996 Ford Mustang

I hate this car with the fire of a thousand suns. I’ve owned it since I was in college. It’s teal green and stupidly long. It has a turning radius comparable to a semi-truck, and it smells a bit like sauerkraut.

It is also a thief magnet: the stereo has been stolen on five separate occasions, so I’ve reconciled myself to driving around with a big hole in the dash. In doing so, I’m sending a clear message to the thieves: “You win! So stop breaking my windows!”. I’d be glad to be rid of this car.

Still, I rarely drive it, so it’s low on miles and in perfect condition. Well, besides the radio.

The car claims to get 18MPG city, but actually gets about 16 MPG total. Emissions-wise, it’s a little above average, but not great, generating 8.7 tons/yr of CO2 for the average driver. 

2.  1990 Jeep Cherokee

This is the car that my husband has had since high school. He adores this car so much that I sometimes worry about it threatening our marriage. This is why I had a cake of it created for our wedding; it’s always best to acknowledge the elephant in the room. Click on the picture to see my husband's car in glorious cake form.

It runs pretty well, but is at the point where parts fail unexpectedly. The final straw for me was when we were driving past the dealership where we normally get it repaired and it started vomiting up enormous quantities of green fluid, like a scene out of an alien movie. And all of this not 20 meters from where it would ultimately be fixed. My husband soothingly patted the car and praised her for “holding in her sick” until we were somewhere easy to repair her, but I’m convinced that this car likes being in the shop. She gets off on the attention.

Anyhow, when we purchased our new Jeep Liberty, we didn’t have a place to park this car anymore, but my husband couldn’t bear to part with it. Thus, it sits in storage, awaiting the day when we have a three car garage and/or a 16 year old child.

The mileage and emissions on this car are not bad, considering its age, but still not great. It gets 16MPG and on average releases 10.2 tons of CO2 a year.

3.  2005 Jeep Liberty

We purchased this car a couple of years ago to replace the untrustworthy Cherokee. We like having 4WD for our frequent snowboarding excursions and it’s come in handy to haul large quantities of stuff around on multiple occasions.

Still, at 15MPG, it is the most inefficient of the three cars we own and also the worst emissions culprit at 10.8 tons of CO2/year. How is it that Jeep’s standards got worse over the last fifteen years?

Our Driving Habits
The hubbie and I are not what I would consider to be frequent drivers. We live in an urban area because we enjoy walking as many places as possible. A typical week looks like this:

1. We carpool to and from work together (70 miles)
2. We take one trip into Seattle to meet friends or run errands (15 miles)
3. We visit local family on a weekend (20 miles)
4. Misc errands, grocery store, etc.  (5 miles)

All told, we put 6000-7000 miles on our cars a year. This is about half the average 12000-15000 miles/year the typical American puts on their car. Which means we already produce only half of the average emissions. But, the fact that our cars are such horrible polluters nearly negates the gains we get by not driving much.

Total Carbon Footprint from driving:
From the above data, we estimate our automobile-specific carbon footprint is about 5.4 tons of CO2 per year. That's a lot. We're talking acres of pine forests here.

Plotting out a change:
We are interested in changing the automobiles that we have to be more eco-friendly overall.  But we’re faced with the following questions and problems:

• How do we do so without incurring huge expense? After all, these cars currently run great, but two of them aren’t worth much money.
• Should we buy new or used? What is the comparative production footprint for a new car compared to the footprint that it makes burning fuel over time?
• How do we cope with my husband’s unyielding devotion to an old SUV? Is there a way to keep this car and make it more environmentally friendly?

Upcoming projects will investigate these questions and hopefully, provide some answers.

Waste Project: How to set up a Home Recycling System

If you followed my garbage audit, you realize that I am not a prolific recycler. But I am committed to changing my habits. Better late than never, right? I recently outlined the reasons for why I’m just starting to recycle (and why we all should). 

The question is, how do we change our habits, and our trash cans, to support this sudden bifurcation, nay, trifurcation of garbage? We need some sort of process or system to make this brainlessly easy.

After kicking off a recycling initiative in our household, here are the eight steps I recommend taking if you want to get started. Even if you already recycle, it might be worthwhile to review as you consider how to max out the number of materials and the percentage of trash your household is recycling.

1. Research the available programs. Figure out what types of recycled materials your local waste management company accepts regularly, what they accept sometimes or have special facilities for, and what they don’t accept.

Similarly, if you live in an apartment or condominium complex, speak with your landlord or go to your trash room to see what your complex is currently supporting in the way of recycling, and how it is collected.

2. Educate your household. Post a list of the things that are recycled somewhere visible in the kitchen and main trash rooms until you and your family get in the habit. Where I live, the city mails out lists periodically. You should be able to find them online at your trash service provider's website as well.

3. Set up an inside holding area for your recyclables. Try to have this near a major trash-producing area, like your kitchen. If your recycling company wants the materials to be separated, and you are space-constrained, see if they will provide some bins. If not, invest in some stackable bins.  If you're flush with cash, another cool idea is a trash can that will handle the separation and crushing for you.

4. Label. Put clear labels on the bins so you and your family don’t forget what is what.  Permanent marker is a cheap and easy way to do this.  If your bins go to the street, while you’re at it, you might as well put your address on the bins as a theft-deterrent.

5. Consider de-centralizing. If the activity around your house is spread across a diverse area, chances are your garbage is too. Consider placing multiple smaller trash bins in major garbage areas, like under bathroom sinks, to increase the likelihood of the trash getting put in the right place.  These can be gathered and sorted once a week at trash time.

6. Make clean trash. Get in the habit of rinsing things like aluminum cans and bottles before they go in the recycling bin.  This will help keep your bins clean, and make the material more efficient to recycle.

7. Crush your trash. Once clean, crush cans and plastics to make more room for other materials.

8. Get it to the curb. Once you’ve gone to the effort of pre-sorting the trash, believe me, you won’t want to ruin it by not getting it to the curb in your designated recycling container. Make a habit of grabbing your recyclables the night before the trucks come.

Tips on Recycling Food Waste:
Due to the decomposing nature of food waste, recycling this can be a bit tricker.  Here are some tips:

1. Food waste can often be recycled with your yard waste. Check the web site for your recycling provider to see if this is supported.   
2. It’s tough to keep food waste around until collection day without it getting disgusting.  One trick is to store your food waste in your freezer in a washable plastic bag or container, and then empty it into the appropriate yard waste container on trash day.  This will eliminate most smelliness and decay.
3. Where I live, people can request a free food scraps bucket to keep their food waste in and carry it to the yard waste container. Your provider may offer something similar.

Here's how we did it:

Our recycling provider requires that we separate out three types of recycled goods:
1. Cardboard (flattened)
2. Plastic, Paper, Aluminum, Glass, and a host of other recyclables can go in the same bin.
3. Food scraps and Yard waste

At present, I am still working with our landlord on #3 to make the yard waste containers available to the individuals in the condominium complex, but here is our simple system for #1 and #2:

1. List of recyclables on the refrigerator as a reminder
We got this handy list from the city of Bellevue in the mail.  We’ll hang onto it until we get the hang of what belongs and what doesn’t. 


2. Cardboard Bin in the Laundry Room
Cardboard represents the single biggest amount of garbage for us, so I wanted the bin to be out of sight.  Rather than buy an expensive plastic container to house it all in, I just used…ready for it?...a cardboard box!  It’s unsightly, but guests don’t go in this room anyway.

We flatten the cardboard and box it in the laundry room until we’re ready to haul it down the elevators to the recycling room.

3.  Recycling container in the pantry.
I repurposed our largest current trash can for recycling the other materials. Now we wash cans, plastics, glass, etc. and place these in this central garbage can. When this is full, we haul the plastic trash bag down to the recycling room to empty it. We then reuse this slightly smelly trash bag in a normal trash can that will end its lifecycle down our garbage chute (our garbage is required by regulations to be housed in a plastic trash bag anyway).

That's it! Simple, efficient, and easy.

Now that we’re actively using our simple recycling process, I plan on running another week long trash audit to see how much we’ve reduced our waste product by. From our limited use so far, I'm guessing at least 70%.

Why should we recycle?

I know that this is a mundane question for many people; the benefits so obvious that they want to laugh at anybody silly enough to ask it. Truth is though, 23% of Americans don’t recycle anything. A full third of Americans don’t recycle aluminum cans, and up to 43% don’t recycle paper or plastic. 

Reasons cited are laziness, belief that recycling does nothing, expense, and unavailability of services. I was raised firmly in the laziness camp. Recycling was not something my family articulated was important. My husband was raised in a midwestern county that didn’t require separation of recyclable materials from garbage, so he never developed the habit.

Also, while 77% of people recycle something, they don't always do so consistently. I know that at my friend’s house, they have a bin in the garage for aluminum cans. But while hanging out with them upstairs, they often just toss them in the trash. Too long to walk, too cold outside. This is probably more common than we’d like to admit.

It's helpful to remind ourselves, then, why recycling is important.

1.  Recycling Conserves Energy
The first thing I think of considering the benefits of recycling is the reuse of materials, but I've discovered that something MUCH more important are the energy implications.

Producing anything requires a lot of energy. You’ve got to obtain and process the original resource via logging or mining. Then you've got to lug it around to one or more places to transform it into a consumeable good. Then you've got to lug it to the stores to retail.  However, the energy required to lug it around is often small in comparison to the energy needed to obtain the raw materials in the first place. 

For example, aluminum comes out of the ground as something called aluminum ore. Aluminum ore only contains 3-5% of actual Aluminum, the rest is essentially dirt. In order to extract the mineral, all of the ore is heated to extremely high temperatures (the melting point of aluminum is 1220.58° F). This process takes an insane amount of energy, and has to melt a large quantity of materials.  At the end of the process, you have some aluminum ready to punch cans out of, but you also have a ton of needlessly hot dirt.

Recycling cans also requires melting down the cans to produce a new metal sheet, but the process is 95% more efficient because the materials being heated are nearly pure aluminum, with no other dirt or other garbage mixed in. This is an outstanding efficiency gain. Similar stories can be told about paper, cardboard, and other raw materials. 

Overall, recycling something will reduce the energy required to make another version of that product by 80-95%. It’s worth doing simply for that reason.

2.  Waste Disposal contributes to global warming
What do you do with garbage?  Ask the residents of Naples, Italy. Their final landfill filled up last spring, and for months this summer their beautiful city was neck deep in refuse.

Around the Puget Sound, trash is usually dealt with in one of two ways: it travels a long distance to a landfill, or its burned.

King County, where I live, has only one landfill left, that is forecasted to reach capacity and close in 2012. Already, a large amount of King County’s waste is being exported by train to landfills near Portland, Oregon. My garbage travels 175 miles to finally get buried? Gives new meaning to the STP (Seattle to Portland bike race). It’s retracing the route my daily waste travels.

Land filling is also a contributor to global warming. As trash decomposes, it creates a gas called methane, which is just as much of a contributor to global warming as the much maligned CO2.

Burning waste avoids the need to put trash in landfills, and it has one other great benefit: it can produce power!  14% of the solid waste in the US is burned.  Burning waste is similar to burning coal, except you  need four times as much of it to produce the same amount of power. 

But what about pollution? An older study states that emissions of a waste incineration plant are less than a coal plant, but greater than natural gas plant. Over the last decade, however, many enhancements have been made to waste-to-energy (WTE) technology in the last decade where some of these plants call themselves “emissions free”. This is a very controversial claim, as many of the toxic chemicals end up going into the ash created by incineration, which leaks into the atmosphere over time anyway (or into the water supply). Overall, the jury is still out on this technique. 

Still, there is no doubt that incinerating trash is much better, pound for pound, for the greenhouse effect than land filling trash. “In the landfill, one tonne of [trash] would produce approximately 62 m³ methane by anaerobic digestion of the biodegradable part of the waste. This amount of methane has more than twice the global warming potential than the one tonne of CO2, which would have been produced by incineration.” [Source: http://www.seas.columbia.edu/earth/papers/global_waste_to_energy.html]

Regardless of its processing technique, the waste that goes out your door is going to pollute the atmosphere. It makes sense to reduce the quantity as much as we can.

3. Recycling Conserves Resources
Finally, the traditionally cited reason for recycling. While the energy and global warming implications of recycling are much more compelling, resource conversation is still an excellent benefit.

Paper and Cardboard require trees. While trees are a renewable resource, they are super useful for things like taking CO2 out of the air and providing us with oxygen to breath. We should try to keep as many of them around as possible. 

Plastics require oil, and we all know the troubles around that resource. Glass requires….um….sand and limestone? Aluminum cans need aluminum. These three resources are finite, and the processes required to extract them from the earth are pretty intrusive, risk lives, and leave a big environmental scar. It only makes sense to reuse the materials we’ve already gotten out when possible.

Now that I understand the implications of not recycling, I am horrified at my past behavior. A couple of times, I tossed aluminum cans into the trash in front of my recycling-friendly friends just to torture them. They would give me a long suffering look before resignedly going to fish the can out of the trash on my behalf. And I would wonder out loud why they were so doggedly devoted. 

I'm no longer ignorant. The damage being done with that single lazy action was invisible to me in the past, but is now fully unveiled.

I'm presently working on creating a recycling system for our home that will allow us to efficiently and confidently recycle the maximum amount of materials.  More on this to come soon.

Energy Project #1: Optimize the Power Usage of my Computers

Current Power consumed:	170 kwh/month	% of total power usage:	36%
Forecasted power conserved:	114 kwh/month	Forecasted % reduction in power usage:	24%
Cost:	$0	Payback Time:	0
Forecasted Money Saved:	$9.09/month	Time to Implement:	10 minutes

As I mentioned in my energy audit, one of the biggest draws of power from my home are my computers and peripherals, compounding for a whopping 36% of my monthly energy consumption.

I work in the technology industry, so I'm constantly using the computers, and like to leave them on for easy access. Why? Simply because it takes forever to turn off and turn back on again. It's a huge hassle and inconvenience.

What I've learned is: I've been stupid. And my previous attitude is stupid. These days, computers have lots of helpful tools that will allow me to conserve power and save money in just a few clicks, without having to deal with any of the hassle of my computer off and on. Everybody wins!

Before I walk you through how to optimize your computers, let's educate ourselves on some important computer concepts.

Computers 101:

Memory: Memory is a temporary storage solution that's really fast to read from and to write to. Your computer uses memory to store things like the applications you are running, and the word document you are currently typing on. Memory helps your computer show quick changes on the screen, and let you switch quickly between applications.

But memory is impermanent on your machine. If your machine loses power, anything that's in memory can go away too. That's why when you were working on your term paper in college, and the power outage happened, and you forgot to save it, you lost it forever. When you save something, it gets written to the hard disk, which is a much more permanent storage solution.

Hard Drive (Disk): When you want something to stick around, you put it in your hard disk. Disks can fail and need to be backed-up, but it's a much more infrequent event than losing your memory. Disks are big and great to store things on, but also a bit slow, so your computer tries not to deal with it too much except when you really need to (like when you're saving a document). 

Why is this important? It's important because understanding it will help you figure out which is the best low-power option for your machine. Some use memory to remember what you were doing, and some use the hard drive.

Other things in your computer that draw power:

If you're new to computers, there are a couple of things you should understand: the first is your monitor. You can turn your monitor off without impacting your computer. It draws from a separate power source. There is very little downside to turning your monitor off as frequently as you can.

There are lots of other components that draw power in your computer. Fans turn on to cool it off, devices that are plugged in through USB ports (like an iPod) want to power up. When your computer is not being used, we want to be certain that all of these things are turned off as well.

1.  Manipulating Power Settings on a Windows XP desktop

The computer I use the least frequently is an XP machine. XP has two primary power saving modes to choose from. They are called "Hibernation" and "Standby". If you're like me and hate how long it takes to turn your computer on and off all of the time, you should get familiar with these modes. They take much less time to use than powering up and down your machine, and are extremely convenient.  Here's an overview:

 

In this instance, the clear best option is hibernation. I work on that computer in long fits and starts, and when I'm done, I won't be back for a while. Response time when I turn it back on is not critical. So I configure my power options to hibernate the entire machine after 20 minutes of inactivity.

Also, I don't need my monitor on for that full 20 minutes of inactivity. I can set the monitor to turn off after five minutes. Long enough so it doesn't turn off in the middle of watching a YouTube video, but short enough that it saves power on top of the hibernation.

To set this up, I need to go into my start menu. I click on "Control Panel", and then click on something called "Power Options". This brings up a window that allows me to change these options.

Ignore the power schemes at the top. They are pretty much useless. Instead, do the following:

• >- Change the "Turn off monitor" to say "After 5 Minutes".
• - Ignore the hard disks and standby options
• - Change the "System Hibernates" option from 'Never' to 'after 20 minutes'.
• - Click "OK".

Next time I want to bring my machine back, it'll take about 15 seconds, and I'll have to reach down and press the power button. But it seems worth it to reduce my power bill by that much.

2. Manipulating Power Settings for a Windows Vista Desktop

My primary desktop computer is a Vista machine. My laptop also runs Vista. Vista has two primary power saving modes that are totally different from XP and differently optimized for laptops and desktops. They are called "Hybrid Sleep" and "Sleep". Generally, Hybrid Sleep is "on" on your desktop and "off" for your laptop.  Overview:

Hibernation still exists in Vista, but is more difficult to set up. If you'd like to look into it for your machine, I suggest you look to this helpful article.

This particular desktop is used a lot more frequently in multiple usage sessions a day, so I decided to let this machine sleep instead of hibernate.

I decided that I wanted my desktop monitor to turn off after 2 minutes of inactivity, and my desktop computer to enter hybrid sleep mode after 20 minutes of inactivity.

Going to the start menu again, again under the control panel, again under "Classic Mode", again under "Power Options". Here the main thing to do is to choose a "Power Plan". There I found three choices: balanced, power saver, and high performance.

Unfortunately, none of these are quite right for what I want, so the only thing to do is to create my own. To do this, select the "Create a power plan" option in the left hand side of the window.

Once here, it is pretty straightforward to select the timing that I want for my monitor and my machine.

3. Manipulating Power Settings for a Windows Vista Laptop

The power settings for a laptop are more complex because it can draw from a battery or from a power socket. When you go to the Power Options screen, you get to consider both of these.

I'm still interested in getting my laptop to hibernate after a long period of time. The battery will still recharge while it is off.

So I'm going to set my laptop when plugged in as to have the same settings as my desktop (monitor off after 2 minutes, sleep after 20).

When it's not plugged in, I need to be a little more aggressive about the power savings to preserve battery, so I set these settings to 2 and 5 minutes respectively. 

Other Tips and Tricks:

• If your computer doesn't seem to be falling asleep, try making sure you have a mouse pad under your mouse. Our glossy desk kept triggering the optical mouse because of the reflective surface. This was solved by a piece of paper or mouse pad easily.
• Vista seems to have a widely documented problem with waking up from sleep. For me, sometimes clicking on my mouse would wake my machine, but not my monitor. This doesn't require a full reboot to fix – just turn the monitor off and on and the your picture should be back.
• A fun way to quantify the impact of this change is to download the Snap CO2 Saver (http://co2saver.snap.com) for Vista or XP. It makes it easy to customize your settings, and while your computer is asleep, it will tell you how much carbon dioxide you have prevented the release of. In the two days since I've downloaded it, it tells me that sleeping just one of my machines has saved 5.20 lbs of CO2. Cool!

I can't wait to get my power bill next month.

The Carbon Audit: Evaluating 4 Carbon Footprint Websites

Read other articles in the Carbon Audit Series: an ongoing investigation into our carbon footprint.

I admit it.  After starting my energy, water, and waste audits, I’ve been delaying an audit around my carbon emissions. Mostly because I’m not sure how to start. Water, water, and energy are easily quantifiable by me and my utilities companies, but carbon output is an invisible menace. Invisible not just because you can’t see carbon emissions, but also because they exist, concealed and out of sight, within nearly everything that I purchase.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if alongside nutritional information and ingredients, every product had posted emissions information on it, on what it took to manufacture and ship the item? Then we could make informed decisions as consumers.

The Carbon Footprint Website Test

A bit daunted by the challenge of figuring all of this out, I decided to start by seeing what the web has to offer. I tried out 4 different websites that estimate your footprint. While using them, I rated them on the following criteria:

1.  Specificity: up to 4 points
I originally started off by saying Accuracy would be my primary criteria, but since I don’t really know what my stats are yet, I can’t yet judge these tools based on accuracy (maybe later…).

So specificity will be the first criteria.  Does the site ask questions and seem to use data that is specific to my lifestyle and situation?  Or is it completely generic?

2. Education Value: up to 3 points
Does the site help me understand why it’s asking the questions it is, how it gets the data, and teach me about the impacts of my actions?

3. Next Steps/Suggestions: up to 3 points
What does the site recommend I do once it assesses my eco-competence?  Does it provide next steps on what to do and actions to take to improve my stats?  Or does it just shame me without providing aid?

The perfect footprint calculator would get a value of 10.

Contestant #1:  Inconvenient Truth Website  (http://www.climatecrisis.net )

Having just watched the movie, trying this website was top of mind. The Climate Crisis website gets points for being short and sweet. It was probably the easiest of these sites to use.  At first, when I filled out my driving and electric bill, I was below average. Awesome! I’m already a rockstar! 

Then I sat down and thought about the plane flights I’d taken in the past year. I love to travel, and there were a lot of flights to account for. The plane flights that I had taken were 4x the carbon dioxide output of all of my other emissions. Ouch. This was shocking to me.

I feel a bit flattened. None of the activities I do on the ground that we make such a big fuss about: driving my SUV, using coal-burned energy, remotely compare with the damage that I do with air travel. Will going green mean giving up my favorite thing?

Following the test, the only action this portion of the site encouraged me to do was to purchase some clean energy credits from a company called Native Energy. To offset all of my carbon dioxide, they would charge me about $90/year. How is this going to get the planes cleaned up though?

Estimated Carbon Output:  8.15 tons

Specificity:  2 / 4
Education Value:  2 / 3
Next Steps/Suggestions: 1 / 3
Total Score:  5 / 10

Contestant #2:  World Wildlife Fund Ecological Footprint Calculator (http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/home)

The World Wildlife Fund Quiz was colorful and fun. It is targeted at the British, so not all of the questions made complete sense to me (who lives in a terrace?), but I enjoyed its great UI nonetheless, whipping through the questions I did understand. 

Some of the questions seemed a tad odd to me, and they didn't explain themselves. For example, why did it ask whether I’d bought jewelry or DIY tools in the last year? Why not ask if I’d bought a car or a home? But the range of questions was quite impressive. Everything from modes of transportation, to how I heat my house, to what sort of food I eat. It did seem to be driving into all potential avenues of hidden carbon emissions.

The WWF Quiz calculated my carbon output at "12.08 tonnes per annum". Tonnes are different than tons, but an annum translates to one year exactly. ;-)

So the conversion gives me 13.3 tons per year. That’s over 50% higher than the Climate crisis site estimated. Also, I need 2.74 planets to sustain my habits. Do we have that many planets lying around?

If I had wanted to, at the end of the quiz I could have joined what looked to be a pretty rich community to get tips and bond with others over becoming more eco-friendly. The registration process was enormous, so I opted not to get into it.

Estimated Carbon Output:  13.3 tons (12.08 tonnes)

Specificity:  4 / 4
Education Value:  2 / 3
Next Steps/Suggestions: 2 / 3
Total Score:  8 / 10

Contestant #3:  BP Carbon Footprint Calculator (http://www.bp.com/extendedsectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9015627&contentId=7029058)

BP makes a lot of noise in the media about how they are re-inventing themselves as green. Do I believe them? I'm not sure yet, but when I heard they had a footprint calculator on their website, I wanted to try it.

The site itself tries to be cutesy, but the interface is limiting. As I go through the series of questions, the right window adds animated images to represent my circumstances. There are two little dudes jumping up and down in the kitchen, skin color changing periodically from light to dark, speaking to each other in excited question marks. A stereo blares angrily in the next room. My cars tremble, assumedly because it’s very cold outside, and an airplane crashes above my house. It’s kind of like playing the Sims if it were released in 1981. 

Despite the hijinks of our weeble friends, the test itself often doesn’t make sense. First of all, many of their dropdowns aren’t large enough to accommodate their values, so I can’t even read the choices it has for me (even when I’m in teeny-tiny font). Also, their air flight questions seem all wrong. It asks me to estimate the number of miles I’ve traveled in long-haul flights, but the highest choice I’m given is 30. Maybe it means the number of flights I’ve taken? Let’s assume that.

The output is wildly off the other two calculators at 23 tonnes of CO2 (that’s 25.3 regular tons).  It also cites a much higher household average than the Climate Crisis site, maybe because it’s calculating household, and the Climate Crisis site is calculating for individuals? Still, it doesn’t add up.

At the end, the little weeble fantasyland actually turns into an educational environment where I can click on the various elements in the weeble’s lives and learn about how to reduce my impact. This is pretty engaging and interesting. I don’t know if these stats are real, but they are interesting:

• “Did you know recycling 1 kilo of alumninium cans can save up to 11 kilos of CO2?”
• “Food transportation in the UK accounts for 8% of vehicle emissions”
• “With Ultimate fuels you can reduce CO2 emissions by 2% to 4%.”

This last one I find a bit suspect. Rather than recommend that people buy more efficient automobiles, BP only recommends that you use their “Ultimate” gas?  Questionable at best.

Estimated Carbon Output: 25.3 tons

Specificity: 2 / 4
Education Value: 1 / 3
Next Steps/Suggestions: 3 / 3
Total Score: 6 / 10

Contestant #4: Environmental Protection Agency
(http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/ind_calculator.html)

There are dozens of other footprint calculators on the web (and I tried a lot of them), but I really wanted to see what our government had to offer. One of the things I found was the EPA’s Personal Emissions Calculator.

On first glance, it looked uninteresting, but once I started plopping data in, I was riveted. The simple design offers realtime feedback of your actions, so you can instantly correlate your behavior with emissions generation. Toward the end of the calculator, it takes you through a series of questions to see whether you’re willing to reduce your emissions and makes suggestions on how to do so.

It estimated my current emissions as 15.3 tons, though I will note, it never asked me about plane flights.  It says the US household average for a 2 person household is just over 20 tons. The tool tells me I should be able to halve my current emissions with a few small changes.

There's a wealth of accessible information on their site. A tool that I found interesting was the Equivalencies Calculator. This tool lets you type in a quantity of greenhouse emissions and then translates that into something that’s easier to understand in real world terms. 

For example, the 15.3 tons of carbon dioxide that I output a year would take 12 acres of pine forests storing carbon for that same year to absorb. We have a lot of pine forests in Seattle, but I don’t think we have 12 acres for every person in the area. That really puts things into perspective for me.

Estimated Carbon Output: 15.3 tons

Specificity: 2 / 4
Education Value: 3 / 3
Next Steps/Suggestions: 3 / 3
Total Score: 8 / 10

In Summary:
Who is right about my carbon emissions? The estimates are so divergent, let’s go with a ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ methodology and average the numbers together for now.  I will guess 15.6 tons a year sounds about right, especially with all of my air travel. 

What have I learned about emissions? In order, the most emission-poor activities I engage in are:

1. air travel (sob...)
2. driving a low mileage car 15 miles a day
3. powering my home

I am still unclear what the relative impact is of buying non-local food, or other consumerism, but I understand that I need to limit where possible.

I will keep hunting for other means to audit my carbon emissions in a more specific way, but I think the more prudent thing to do would be to move on. Time to initiate some projects that will start to reduce my emissions and overall impact. 

Other footprint tools you may enjoy:
http://www.carbonfootprint.com
http://www.fightglobalwarming.com/carboncalculator.cfm
http://www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/calculator/
http://www.earthday.net/footprint/index.asp
http://www.safeclimate.net/calculator/
http://www.conservationfund.org/gozero
http://hes3.lbl.gov/hes/hes.taf?f=top

Mention in the Stranger

Well, golly.  After blogging in this forum for less than a week, I got a mention yesterday in the blog of one of my favorite publications: The Stranger.  It’s exciting to find out that people are actually listening.  The comments have been really interesting. 

Yes, I know that my blog is not for the environmental sophisticate (yet!).  If you’re already leading a green life, you may not be interested in watching me cast off my environmental naiveté.  I applaud those of you who are already lean, mean, and green, and hope to join your ranks soon.

Thanks to those who are leaving tips and tricks. I’m already learning a lot from your contributions. It’s wonderful to see how supportive people are. 

The Waste Audit

After the relatively straightforward energy and water audits, figuring out how to do a waste audit was a pretty big challenge. Living in a condo, we don’t even keep a large trash can in the garage that gets taken to the curb each week. Instead, we walk our trash across the hall and whoosh it down a chute, never to be seen again.

Not only did I need to understand how much trash we generated in a week, but I also needed to understand its makeup. When considering the plan, I walked over to our kitchen trashcan and took a look inside. There was all manner of interesting garbage in there, but it was all coated in a beef stew sludge from the food scraps that we threw  away last night, rendering it impenetrable to any realistic examination. The answer was clear. In order for this to work, not only would we need to keep our trash around for a week, but we were going to need to separate it out too.

I devised a system. In order to prevent on-the-sly trashing, I took every trash can in the house and moved it into the kitchen. Each trashcan got a label over it indicative of its intended contents: cardboard, paper, glass, aluminum, food scraps, plastic, and miscellaneous (for all of the trash I hadn’t thought of). 

When my husband got home from work and saw the mess, he groaned mightily. He hates exposed trash (and unnecessary process). But I was surprised how easily he and I fell into the system.  It was easy to take trash generated from the bathroom and other places into the kitchen and put it in the right bin.  Bodes well that we might be able to change our trash habits.

At the end, we definitely had some mighty smells developing in our home, so I quickly weighed and catalogued the refuse.

Let’s examine what was in our garbage, starting with the lowest volume stuff and working our way up to the highest volume.

The Break Down of our Trash:

1. Glass

Weight: 2 pounds

Volume: .167 sq ft

I almost wish we used more glass. It’s so pretty and fun. But alas, we only drank four beers during the week. Pretty good assortment though.

2. Aluminum Cans

Weight: 1.5 pounds

Volume: 1.5 sq ft

My husband and I are huge Coke addicts. It’s our one vice (clearly, we’re not drinking much beer…). And we don’t recycle any of these cans. Pretty appalling, when you see a week’s worth of drinks accumulated in one place.

The bag that these were stored in was the second most disgusting garbage bag out of the bunch. Most of the cans had to be pried off the inside of it, so coated was it in toxic, sticky sludge. In the latest recycling material I’ve read, they request that you rinse cans and bottles out. I can certainly understand why.

3. Miscellaneous Trash

Weight: 1.5 pounds

Volume: 1.8 sq ft

The miscellaneous bag had a lot of weird stuff in it.  Some was cardboard or aluminum food containers that were unrecyclable. A lot of it was used packaging that didn’t seem to fit any of the major categories (what would you do with a dried out highlighter or empty deodorant?). Some of it was bathroom rubbish like q-tips, hair from my brush, and Kleenex. 

I’d had an encounter with a black cat while wearing a white sweater that week, so I have loads of lint roller sticky things in the pile. 

There are also three beer bottle caps. Hey! Only three? Didn’t we drink four beers? 

On the whole, this is largely stuff that qualifies as real trash, stuff that is past its practical usefulness, that needs to be thrown out.

4. Paper

Weight: 9.5 pounds

Volume: 1.8 sq ft

Paper towels and snail mail were the two culprits here. Look at how many catalogs there are!  In just a week! The biggest culprit was Victoria’s Secret with four catalogues. Honestly, I’m not so hard up for bras that I need a reminder every other day.

And no, we didn’t catalog our toilet paper usage.  Gross.

5.  Plastic

Weight: 1 pound

Volume: 2 sq ft

The plastic in our garbage either came from food containers or packaging materials. While it was light, it was also pretty voluminous. A lot of the plastic was contaminated with food stuffs as a result.  In fact, some of the Lean Cuisine containers you see in there were downright hairy with mold by the time this photo was taken. 

Note the huge take-out containers in the front.  We pretty regularly have one or two of those on a weekly basis.

6. Food Stuffs

Weight: 8.5 pounds

Volume: 2 sq ft

I couldn’t get a picture of our food stuffs because the second I opened the bag to inspect it, my husband, who was standing 20 feet away, instantly yelled “OH MY GOD!  GET IT OUT OF HERE!”. He grabbed the bag and sprinted down the hallway before I could catch him. So suffice it to say, it was foul.

This bag consisted of what you’d expect. Pasta we didn’t eat, moldy bread, eggshells, wilted lettuce, etc.

And the prize for most garbage goes to:

7.  Cardboard!

Weight: 11.5 pounds

Volume: 4.3 sq ft

We are big online shoppers, so it’s no surprise that cardboard represents a significant portion of our garbage. Luckily, the cardboard from our packages is the one thing that we actively recycle today (mostly because it often doesn’t fit in the trash chute).

But I was stunned at how much of our food packaging uses perfectly good cardboard that we normally throw out. This was a real revelation for me.

The Summary:

Overall we generated 13.5 square feet of garbage in a week (~101 gallons).  That’s 35.5 pounds of trash.  And all of it going to the landfill.

And how do we stack up? The Environmental Protection Agency reports that every American generates about 4 pounds of trash per day. In this case, we’re doing a little better than the allotted 70 pounds/week (for the two or us), but our household is still generating 1800 pounds of garbage a year.  That’s nearly a ton of stuff exiting our doors.

As a footnote, we also had about 2.5% classification errors in our garbage. Plastic in the paper garbage can, and vice versa. If we can make that many mistakes while we're trying to be good about it, I wonder what types of weird crap recycling facilities have to put up with.

After going through this exercise, I have little doubt that we’ll be able to cut this down by half, if not to a quarter of what it is now. 

The Energy Audit: Part Two -- Which household appliances draw the most power?

This article is part 2 of a series.  Read previous article.

The next question to answer in my power audit was what things in our home are using what level of power.  In order to answer this, I spent $20 on a fantastic device called the P3 International Kill-a-Watt Electricity Usage Monitor.  This handy gizmo plugs into any outlet, you plug your appliance in question into it, and you can see how much power the beast is drawing.

I had far too much fun with this thing, running all over my condo, inhaling large quantities of dust as I crawled into tight corners under tables I haven’t been in years, plugging and unplugging like there was no tomorrow.  A small part of me felt like I was solving a big mystery by uncovering this data.  It was enlightening and empowering!

I wasn’t able to go behind my fridge, dishwasher, washer/dryer, or microwave/stove/oven, so those are out of the analysis for now.  Everything else in my home that plugs in was included.

The top five appliances in terms of wattage drawn:

1. Hair Dryer - 1875 watts
2. Toaster    -  1515 watts
3. Panini Grill - 1320 watts
4. Vacuum   -  1165 watts
5. Iron         -   1040 watts

Apparently generating heat takes a lot more wattage than generating light. I don’t know why this surprised me so much.  I guess it’s just kind of strange to think about making toast in the morning leading to major worldwide crises.  To me, toast always feels like a calming influence: something so neutral you could sit down with the Palestinians and Israelis on and come to an agreement that this was a lovely breakfast.

Truth is though, none of these devices runs for very long, so in order to figure out what the culprits are in my energy usage, I need to look at the wattage multiplied by the estimated usage time of each of these devices.  If you'd like to look at the entire audit, you can download the spreadsheet I used. 

The top ten appliances in terms of monthly power drawn:

1. Desktop Computer #1 – 72 kwh/month
2. Desktop Computer #2 – 64.8 kwh/month
I was shocked in at how much power my computers draw. Much more so than your average light fixture, and I leave them on 24 hours a day.  It’s just so darn time-consuming to shut down and start them up on a regular basis.

Even worse, if I add up all of the “stuff” that is attached to my always running computer: external hard drives, speakers, printers, DSL, WiFi... the situation is even more bleak.  All totaled, these systems plus peripherals cost me 115 kwh/month, or a whopping 36% of my total power usage!

3. Aerogarden – 36 kwh/month
My Aerogarden is a nifty box that irrigates and “suns” seeds to grow me basil and tomatoes. So much for growing herbs in Seattle in winter.  There’s no way the few handfuls of chopped basil I get from this bad boy is worth the energy it’s drawing.  It’s likely going to be cheaper to buy it at the store, or try to gently encourage some to grow in my window.

4. Comcast Cable box – 28.3 kwh/month
This one just flat out pissed me off.  My cable box from Comcast draws 40 watts. That would be fine, except it continues to draw those 40 watts with the cable power turned off.  Literally, turning off the power to the cable box did NOTHING to its power consumption levels despite the happy little clicking noise it made as it switched off.

That would be okay.  I could unplug the cable box when I needed to.  But when I do that, it loses state entirely – all of the data, program listings, DVR settings, are wiped until they can be restored from the central server again.  And that takes some time.  Twelve full minutes by my count.

Does anyone know if satellite tv has a similar problem?  I might feel a switch coming on...

5. TV #1 – 24 kwh/month
I like my TV.  And it is definitely a power draw during the few hours it’s on a day.  We’ll have to see if there’s a way to handle that without cutting back on viewing time.

6. Xbox 360 – 18.24 kwh/month
There’s been ton of articles written about it. The Xbox360 is power hungry!  Even when it’s turned off and plugged in, it draws a watt or two.

7. Family Room Lamp – 14.4 kwh/month
The lamp that’s pretty much always on in my family room is a monstrous little power drainer.

8. Computer Monitor #1 – 13.44 kwh/month
My primary computer monitor is always on, showing pics of the family, ready for me to use it.  Not good, apparently.

9. Vornado Fan – 9.84 kwh/month
The husband sleeps hot.  He turns into molten lava at night and requires a constant cool breeze aimed at him to stay semi-solid.  And since I’ve refused to fix the air conditioner, he’s been reduced to sleeping with the window open with a fan to try to circulate some air into the room. 

10. Hair Dryer – 8.44 kwh/month
I have long hair, and it has a tendency to go wavy and weird when I let it air dry.  It looks like the most energy-efficient way to fix that, however, is to straighten it with a hair straightener after its dried, and not to blow dry it straight.  Seems like a small behavior modification could make a difference in power usage here.

In Summary:
The overall audit accounted for approximately 70% of my total energy usage. Working backwards, it seems that the rest of my appliances and recessed lighting uses about 197kWh/month.  I’ll need to dive more into these later in order to completely address my energy usage. But this is a great start to understanding my energy patterns, and how to alter them.

Moving forward, it’s time to start diving into some projects to see exactly how far I can reduce this.

The Energy Audit: Part One

I’m auditing myself to figure out what my environmental footprint is.  Part of this analysis needs to look at the energy that I consume. 

To keep this initial energy audit simple, I’m going to just look at electricity.  I have a natural gas water heater, that I’ll look into later.  Also, I’m going to leave out the gas that I use in my car, and the gas required to get food and goods to me.  For now, what I want a clear picture of is how much electricity I am using, primarily in my home. 

Like with my water provider, there are some great online tools that make this pretty easy to figure out. Puget Sound Energy provides my electricity usage over the last two years.  The last billing statement I got says that I used 553 kilowatt hours of power.

Um…what is a kilowatt hour?
Kilowatt hours (abbreviated as kWh) are the unit used by power companies in the US to bill against.  It’s based on the watt, which we should all be familiar with from light bulbs. 1 kilowatt hour = 1,000 watt hours. So, a 100 watt light bulb running for one hour would use 100 watts of power, or .1 kilowatt.

A good way to visualize a kilowatt hour is to think of some of the following examples.  It’s enough power that you could:

• Run 10 lamps with 100 watt bulbs for one hour
• Run your vacuum cleaner for one hour
• Run your hair dryer or microwave oven for one hour
• Watch TV for 10 hours.

Now we’re prepared to look at our power consumption in terms of kWh.

So -- how much power am I using?

Our average power consumption over the last 6 months was 474 kWH. 

Now, notice the big dip from two summers ago?  We have a cooling/heating system in our condo that works by blowing air over hot or cool water.  About a year ago, it started leaking like crazy into our bedroom whenever it ran.  We haven’t gotten it fixed yet.  What’s remarkable about this, is that when we were using it regularly (just during early morning and evening hours), we were using 2.5 times more power per month. 

We survived this summer pretty easily without A/C.  But now it is winter and I’m working from home.  As I type this, I’m sitting in a chair with sweatshirt, hat, socks, gloves, and a huge blanket and still have to stop typing every few minutes to blow into my hands. I am FREEZING. It’s not comfortable, and I’m going to have to fix it.  The trick will be how to do it in an energy-efficient way.  There’s no way we’re going back to the old system – it is a ridiculous power sink.

How are we doing compared to the rest of America?
According to the Department of Energy, the average household in America consumes 10,656 kWh per year.  According to my averages, with our heating/cooling system broken, we consume 6348 kWh/year or 60% of the national average. Which makes sense. We're a relatively smaller household with no children, so our power needs are going to be more in control.

However, with our heating/cooling systems working, however, we consume 37% OVER the national average.  Just goes to show how one small change can make sure a huge difference.

The next step for the energy audit was to understand which devices were using the most power.  Click here to read the next article in the series: Which household appliances draw the most power?

The Water Audit: Part One

I started with water because it seemed like the simplest to do, initially.  Water isn’t a particular problem up in the Pacific Northwest, but there may be upcoming water shortages worldwide if global warming hits full force, so I should understand my impact.

Luckily, my water billing provider made this really easy for me. I simply went to http://www.ista-na.com and was able to access the my full water usage history since I’ve been in this condominium.

Of course, if this hadn’t been available online, auditing my water usage would have been a fairly trivial matter of reading my meter on a semi-regular basis, and jotting down the readings.

Here is my water usage for the past three years (scale in gallons):

The spikes aren’t really indicative of usage, but of a bill they forgot to send to me, so there are two months of usage under that number.

On average, our household uses 123.74 gallons of water a day, averaging out to 3712.3 gallons a month.

How does this stack up?  Not too badly. According to a UN study, the average American household uses 153 gallons per person, per day.  We don’t have a yard to care for, so our water usage falls significantly below that, somewhere closer to the usage of Austria or Denmark.

 

That doesn’t mean we couldn’t do better.  The UK somehow has extremely low water usage, though they have similar living standards to ours.

I’m curious how our daily water usage breaks out to contribute to this number, so I’m going to start to track our daily stats.  More to come on this.