Brave New Leaf

Carbon Footprint Check-In

It's time to see how I'm doing with my carbon footprint for the year 2008. As a reminder, I've set a 2008 New Year's Resolution to cut my carbon footprint in half: from 22 tons to 11 tons.

On initial inspection, things are going incredibly well. The year to date total is just under 3 tons. Highlights:

• Our electricity bill has remained low and steady since implementing our energy-saving projects last year.
• Our hot water projects have helped immensely.
• Recycling is going very well. We are producing 75% less garbage every week!
• We have been making a conscious effort to walk more and drive less. This has significantly reduced our gas miles, which should be some of our biggest savings this year.
• We took one trip to Cleveland earlier this year to visit my in-laws, but other than that our travel has been kept in check. We did take one vacation so far this year, but just stayed at home and enjoyed the local area. It was great.

Before I can claim victory, I have some very bad news. You may remember that 2008 is also the year that my husband and I decided to take a three month sabbatical from work to travel the world.  For us this is a one-time, chance of a lifetime opportunity.  We'll be going all over: Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Spain, England, and elsewhere in Western Europe.

Our itinerary is vetted now, and I ran it through the carbon calculator. The results are not good.

The flights we'll be taking will more than double our remaining carbon footprint. On the plus side, we won't be driving for three months, but this barely makes a dent in the result. With the flights factored in, we will only improve our carbon footprint about 33% this year.

Of course, there are lots of ways to play with the numbers to make these figures stab my conscience less. I am offsetting our travel, of course, with a company that will plant extra trees to soak up this carbon. In theory, since this is a once-in-a-lifetime trip, I could amortize the carbon cost out over the next few years.

There are also justifications such as the fact that travel better connects me to the world, and inspires me to work harder towards its preservation, which is true. But the stark reality is that despite our commitment to shrinking our footprint, when our goal came into direct conflict with one of our passions, we couldn't make the sacrifice.

I have mixed feelings about this. Of course, I look at all I have accomplished so far and am enormously pleased with it. But I am also disappointed in my ability to be hardcore.

So what will I do? My current plan requires me to look beyond just myself and my measly little footprint. In order to balance the scales and achieve some semblance of my goal, I will need to find other places I can make an impact. Convince my apartment complex to switch to CFL lighting, perhaps. Maybe work with friends and family to shift their habits. Enact an energy-savings plan at my place of work.

In the end, finding other ways to prevent greenhouse emissions beyond my personal lifestyle may balance the equation on paper. But it still feels like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

I'm Quitting Diet Coke to Save the World

It's getting around time to green my food and beverages. I've done the research, and now I'm ready to make some changes. I'm going to start with beverages first, because it is a much more finite universe.

A quickie beverage audit reveals what I drink in a week:

• 28,000 Diet Cokes (you think I’m exaggerating but little do you know…)
• A few cups of coffee, brewed at home
• A few glasses of water from the fridge
• One plastic bottle of water, purchased at the gym
• Two cups of tea
• One beer
• One glass of red wine
• Two glasses of San Pellegrino

Yes, I know. Not the most healthy set of beverages in the world. Remarkably unhealthy, in fact, with all of the data coming out about the link between aspartame and metabolic syndrome. And yes, my blood is caramel color and carbonated.

It’s time to green my beverages. First stop: I’m quitting Diet Coke.

There, I said it. I’m going to stop drinking Diet Coke. I’ve drunk 4-6 per day for 10 years, and I’m putting an end to it. Not only should this increase my health, but it should help the environment as well. Why?

No more aluminum cans
In our waste audit, you saw how many aluminum Coke cans we generated in a week. We’ve gotten wonderful at recycling these, but aluminum is still incredibly energy-intensive to mine, produce, and recycle.

Plus, many people still don’t recycle them. In 1999, 44 billion cans and bottles from soft drinks were thrown into landfills. Given the Coca-Cola Co.'s 44 percent market share, that means that 19 billion cans and bottles with Coca-Cola Co.

Water Scarcity
On a global level, the Coca-Cola company is responsible for aggressive policies that are contributing to water scarcity.  Generally, that seems like a silly thing to worry about, since the product they are producing is 99% water, but many people do not know that it takes three times as much water to make soda products as is produced. That’s 6.24 liters of water to make your two-liter bottle of Diet Coke.  Do the math – it doesn’t make sense.

The Corn Crunch
Making high fructose corn syrup is the second largest use of corn in North America; feeding livestock is the largest. But corn prices are going up because more and more of it is being used to product ethanol. Now, the effectiveness of corn-as-fuel can certainly be debated, but drinking regular pop doesn’t help the issue any.

I’ll discuss how I’m going to green the rest of my beverages a bit later. I think I feel a caffeine headache coming on…

Dishwashers are a greenie's dream

Dishwashers are a greenie’s dream: an appliance that works AND is more efficient than doing it the manual way. Several studies show that today’s dishwashers save energy and water overall doing your dishes by hand (not to mention time!).

But that doesn’t mean we can’t optimize its efficiency even further. Armed with some tips I pulled off the internet, I set out to make mine better. Some of it was a little trickier than I thought it would be.

Lower your hot water temperature
When I did my hot water heater audit last year, I noted that I didn’t want to lower the temperature below 120F because I wanted my dishes to be sanitized. Little did I know that most modern dishes have built-in heaters that heat the water to 140F degrees to make sure all the bacteria and mold gets burned off. So lowering my hot water temp has little to no impact on my dishwasher’s sanitary effectiveness. Cool.

Running a full load
In the “duh” category of green tips, the best way to increase dishwasher efficiency is to always run a full load. Figure out who in your family has a talent for stuffing the dishwasher the fullest. My husband is a whiz at fitting more in the dishwasher. Even when I think I’ve totally maxed it out, he’ll fiddle for a bit and magically slide four more bowls in. I think it’s all of those years playing Tetris.

I used to worry about letting dishes hang out in the sink or dishwasher with gross food stuff on them for a few days while I waited for the dishwasher to get full. Sometimes little fuzzy colonies of mold would start to emerge. However, studies show that dishwashers are remarkably efficient at sterilizing these bad boys too.

Don’t Pre-wash
I grew up washing the dishes before I put them in the dishwasher. It was only after I got married that my husband observed me cleaning up one day and offered “Um, you don’t actually have to do that”. I didn’t believe him, but I tried it his way, and lo and behold – the bowls absolutely caked with marinara sauce came out perfectly clean!

Today’s dishwashers are much better at cleaning the gross grit off of your dishes. Save yourself dishwater hands and hot water by just slapping your dishes in the dishwasher. Like I was, you may be surprised at the results.

Air Dry
This suggestion makes perfect sense. Why bother using energy to dry my dishes, when I can just open the door a crack and have them dry overnight anyway? But I was completely stymied by the confusing display of options on my dishwasher. Which one was going to turn off the dry cycle? Look at these buttons – it’s not exactly clear.

I fished out my dishwasher manual which ended up being for a completely different model of dishwasher (huh?). The GE website didn't have the manual for my model. The only thing left to do is experiment.

Turns out turning off “speed dry” is the right thing to do. With this off, the dishwasher will not enter a dry cycle, saving lots of energy. Sometimes bowls or tupperwares in the top rack have a tough time getting dry, but we just let those rack dry a little longer and they’re fine. It’s a minor inconvenience.

My particular dishwasher doesn’t have an “energy saver” mode, but I’ve heard this is the most efficient way to run your dishwasher. Give it a try and let me know how it works for you.

The last set of things I looked into was my dishwashing detergent, but this ended up being such a complex issue, I’m going to save writing about it for tomorrow.

What steps have you taken to optimizing your dishwashing for maximum green-ficiency?

More help with calculating a carbon footprint

I found a couple of more useful carbon emissions calculators, that I thought I would share.

1.  TerraPass Flight Carbon Calculator (http://www.terrapass.com/flight/flightcalc.php)

This groovy calculator lets you type in the specific arrival and destination points of your journeys, and gives you a per passenger output of the specific emissions for that journey. It also remembers the journeys you've made and will give you a total CO2 emissions number for all of your flights.

With the trips my husband and I have made in the past year, we've travelled 28,153 miles, which is 22,984 lbs CO2 for the both of us. As I've noted before, this is our most significant emissions statistic.

2.  Green Tags Carbon Calculator (https://www.greentagsusa.org/GreenTags/calculator_intro.cfm)

This is the simplest overall carbon footprint calculator that I have found to date, and it's recommended by King County for having good Washington-specific data built into it.

Though it doesn't weigh the impact of things like recycling, the findings reinforce perfectly the estimates I've built for myself so far. The Natural Gas heating number exactly matches the number I came up with independently, and the total of 15 tons of emissions matches my carbon footprint averaging I took from some of the web's most popular tools.

 

Hot Water Heater Audit

Up until recently, my energy audits have pretty much ignored my appliances. Which is an enormous thing to handwave. Appliances are huge energy suckers. But my arm muscles are too measly to roll them out of their designated areas to leverage my Kill-A-Watt. And most of them are sufficiently old that there is no published energy information about them.

My hot water heater, however, has its energy information posted right on its side. I have a natural gas hot water heater, which is pretty common. Over 2/3 of American households heat their home or water with  natural gas. Generally, hot water heaters are the #2 energy users in the home, after the home heating system. Let's take a look at my water heater:

Here it is. I have to say that I have no complaints about it. My water is always nice and hot. But boy, does it look complicated. Tons of tubing and dials and boxes and meters.

Two things stick out: there seems to be some sort of timer in the upper right hand corner. Inspecting it further, it appears to be set to the "off" position from 1-2am and then "on" the rest of the time. I have no idea what this is for, but it excites me. Where there's an off switch or a timer, there's usually an opportunity to save some energy!

The other knob towards the bottom clearly controls the hot water temperature. It seems to be pushed a little past its recommended setting. Which could mean I'm overheating the water.

Trouble is, I have no idea how much natural gas I use. In our condominium complex, natural gas is split up and divided equally amongst all of the units. Now that I think about it, it's hardly fair. No matter how much I am able to reduce my natural gas consumption, I won't save any money.

I can however, endeavor to reduce my carbon emissions. Natural gas, while much better than its fossil fuel cousins, still releases CO2 and other gases when it burns.

Let's see if we can come up with an estimate of how much CO2 is released from this guy per year. Warning: math ahead!

The number on the Energy Star tag tells me that this hot water heater uses 272 therms/year. A wikipedia search reveals that a therm is a heat unit equal to 100,000 BTUs, another heat unit.

Searching on natural gas reveals that 1 cubic foot of natural gas can produce about 1030 BTUs, but most natural gas hot water heaters are only about 90% efficient in acheiving this metric. Okay, now we're getting somewhere. 1 cubic foot of natural gas yields about 927 BTUs in my hot water heater.

That means that there is over 29,000 cubic feet of natural gas pumping through my pipes to that water heater every year. Every twelve days I've burned through enough natural gas to fill up my entire apartment!

It's a lot, but it's nowhere near what I'm being billed for. The $7/month that I pay should get me 84,000 cubic feet a year.

Now we need some way to translate this into CO2 levels. Naturalgas.org states that 117,000 pounds of CO2 go into the air for every billion BTUs of natural gas burned. Big numbers, but it should work. That's 117 pounds for every million BTUs.

Crunching the numbers tells me that 272 therms is equal to 3182.4 pounds of carbon dioxide. Unbelievable. Just heating my water produces 1.5 tons of CO2 a year. I'd need to nurse 38 saplings from infancy to ten years old to soak up that much carbon.

There's a shortcut through this formula: X therms * 12.0593 = pounds of CO2 emitted. Try it yourself and see how much CO2 you're producing.

I'm off to investigate how to reduce this.

Energy Audit #3: Where does my power come from?

This article is part 3 of a series.  Read previous article.

Growing up, I was blessed with four younger sisters. As a result, I was intensely interested in where babies came from, and received several progressive "birds and the bees" lectures as our family count and my age increased.

I had no similar interest in where electricity came from. Power was a constant in life, except for occasional  outages, which were really just an excuse to tell ghost stories and eat all of the ice cream in the freezer. Flip a switch, and voila! Power was always there. Like air or sibling rivalry, it was always there. It needed no origin story.

For me, it's time to finally tell one.

Before we start with the mechanics of "how" power arrives at my condo, perhaps it's best to start with "who" is involved.

My power comes from a company called Puget Sound Energy, the biggest and oldest provider of power in the Pacific Northwest. Currently a wholly owned subsidiary of Puget Energy (stock ticker: PSD), they are in the process of being sold for $5B to a group of private investors out of New York.

PSE generates electricity for over 1 million people in Western Washington, and provides Natural Gas to another 750k. It generates about a third the power that goes to its customers, and purchases the rest from local companies.

I was really surprised by the overall power mix PSE supplies. The largest source of its power is hydro-electric, followed by coal, natural gas, and a piddly 1% of nuclear energy.

Currently, less than 3% of PSE's current power comes from renewable sources: 2% comes from wind farms, and 1% from waste, biomass, and other resources. 

I'm happy to see that hydro-electric is the primary source of power. We should consider ourselves lucky to have so much water as a resource in the Pacific Northwest. While hydro-electric has some downsides due to the habitat destruction it can enable, from a carbon footprint perspective it is vastly superior to gas and coal based sources.

Along with the dams and coal/gas plants that PSE owns and operates, it also has two large windfarms in Eastern Washington, making it the largest provider of renewable energy in the Pacific Northwest. They also have a proposal on their web site for a solar plant to be built on the site of one of their wind farms.

At a surface level, it appears that PSE has committed itself to green power. The goals they have set for themselves are ambitious: 10% of their power needs to come from renewable sources by 2013. And Washington voters have upped the stakes further: renewable energy needs to represent 15% of their portfolio by 2020.

The sale of PSE seems to be a good move to give it the financial solvency it needs to achieve those goals, as well as continuing repairs from the 2006 wind storm and reinforcing the existing grid.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the fantastic resources they have made available on their website, including:

• Rebates and coupons on all kinds of green products
• Tools to monitor and improve your energy usage
• Sign up for the Green Power Program, a program that charges you a little extra for power to support their development of renewable energy

It eases my mind significantly to understand that our power company values both renewables and conservation, and is making strides on both fronts. But what do my more informed readers think? Does it go far enough?

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.

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

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.