C2Comics Blog

While munching away on some cracker/chip things and glancing at the package, I became aware of Terracycle, a company that takes waste reuses it and sells a new product.  For example, they take old pepsi bottles, stuff them with the excrement of worms, and sell it as fertilizer.  I recently read the not-so-recent article on how “Recycling Is Bullshit“, and even though recycling is not, in fact, bullshit, it made me rethink my waste habits.  I love gadgets and I like to buy shiny new things, but I know I really should, in addition to recycling, start to reduce and reuse things.

So clicking through Terracycle’s website was pretty fun for a bit, signing up to terracycle, checking out the goods they had to sell, and scrolling through their blog.  I am not sure how well the terracycling will go on my end…it is reassuring that everything is paid for – after you sign up a container will be sent to your home – but the quantity of what they are asking for is a little daunting.  I signed up for the yogurt one figuring, hey, I eat some yogurt!  But not only do you need to eat a specific brand you also need to send back 400 containers.  I…don’t eat that much yogurt in a year…additionally, sometimes I like to reuse the pots for something (they are very good for holding nuts and bolts).

If the amount of materials I’ll need to be storing in my home before I am able to ship them out wasn’t a strike against it, the products they sell would be.  It’s a new company so there isn’t much, but their recycled lunch box is simply some capri sun cases sewn together.  Soda bottles sent in are rinsed out, filled with cleaning product, and given a new label – no melting down of materials or anything!  Seems strange, then, that a bottle of window cleaning solution from terracycling costs about the same as a bottle of windex.  Oh, but that is before the shipping and handling I need to pay to get it to me – a whopping ten dollars.  I’m assuming this high S&H tag is because it is a chemical…but I am not sure I want to pay thirteen dollars for a liter of window cleaning solution….

Which brings us to the final point, which was a question raised by teracyle itself on the blog, The Eco Capitalist, and which is not necessarily Terracycle-centric.  The question is,

Would you pay more to go green?

In my salad days the answer was yes.  While living with my parents all the small income I had was disposable.  I would buy cfl bulbs and recycled paper towels, telling my parents they needed to get on this bandwagon – we have to save the earth!

…and then I started accumulating bills.  Between rent payments, student loans, gas prices, I must be frugal with the miniscule amount of money I am left with.  Currently I buy green when it is immediately practical – I will fork out the extra money for CFL bulbs because I do not have to change them as often and they will save me electricity, I buy “organic” soap because it is trichlosan-free, I keep my hybrid (which I initially financed during those green years) because it saves me money on gas.  But when it comes to the $4.99 box of granola in the recycled package versus the $3.99 box that hasn’t been recycled, unless I happened to have found an extra dollar in my jeans, I will go for the lower priced one.

These days the hierarchy is nutrition > price > green

I am not alone in this thought, as many of my friends will voice their love of Whole Foods, a market with wonderful produce, organic foods, and an atmosphere that just makes you feed good inside its walls, but hardly any of them shop there.  “Their fruit is so fresh and it tastes so good….but it is so expensive!” said a friend just yesterday.  Two of my siblings work at Whole Foods and receive a discount, but despite that it is still too expensive for them to do the majority of their shopping there.  Even without these tough economic times it is hard to make people pay more for relatively little immediate gain.

One question that is always on my mind is – why are these “green goods” more expensive in the first place?  When we talk about the benefit of recycled and reused materials, we talk about how less energy is needed to make them.  Less energy use = more green, right?  Well, less energy use should, logically, mean less money.  If Terracycle is getting most of its raw materials for almost nothing, then why does it cost the same as a company that is purchasing completely new plastic?  If paper towels are made with 50% recycled paper that did not need to undergo the same energy-intensive process as new paper does, why is it still more expensive to get them?

There are probably some very good answers to these questions but there are also probably some bad ones.  The bottom line, though, regardless of what the answer is, is that as long as it is more expensive the majority of people will not buy it.  Does this mean they are mass polluters that don’t care about the planet?  Not necessarily.  Some may do what they can to help, some may, oh, I dunno, buy that cheaper, non-green toilet paper, but shove it into a reusable bag and spend the next half hour pedaling furiously on their bicycle to get it back home.  Who knows.

So how do we get cheap and green?  It has to be a three-tiered solution consisting of the consumer, the producer, and the regulators (i.e. the government).  Most of the time it seems to fall only on the consumer – it is green and goes towards the greater good, therefore you must pay more.  Green consumers seem to accept this, “I will pay more because I am doing good!” but it leaves the people who cannot afford to pay more out and feeling guilty.  We should also begin saying to these producers – your product is for the greater good and you should accept a smaller profit.   The government, too, should realize the country benefits from these practices and offer tax breaks to all producers of green goods (not just the ones with the best lobbyists) and incentives to the consumers of those goods.  Perhaps the sales tax could be less in certified “green” markets.

Currently the only people who seem to go green are the higher classes who have large disposable incomes.  Sure, it costs very little to live off the grid, but getting off the grid requires sums of money the average American does not have access to.

I realized today the resolutions outlined in my last post are quite self-centered!  This makes sense as I am, at my core, an incorrigible narcissist.  However, just because something makes sense doesn’t make it okay!  To offset my self-centered resolutions here are four resolutions that are less self-centered, and shows consideration for others albeit still ultimately driven by self interest.

1. Reduce!  Reuse!  Recycle, too!  ….with emphasis on the reducing and reusing.  At a conference I went to recently, where the topic often was brought back to renewable energy and wind power, sparking many a person’s interest, one individual wisely cautioned all of us that “we cannot eat renewable energy deserts until we’ve eated our conservation vegeatbles.”  The idea of renewable energy is, of course, very sexy (these urban windmills are super sexy!), but we also need to be aware of ALL the costs in a system, not just the most obvious.  One study recently showed that there are a group of parents in the UK that buy cloth diapers instead of disposable diapers.  By cleaning and reusing these diapers, there’s a belief that the waste or carbon footprint produced by these parents is lower than those parents that buy and toss out disposable diapers.  However, this was not the case.  Disposable diapers present an obvious waste.  Washable diapers have a cost as well.  There’s a water and electricity cost between the washer and dryer machines.  There may even be a gasoline cost as well, if a drop off/pick up service is being used.

I’m going to be more aware of my impact on the environment and work to reduce it.  There was a man who kept all his trash and recycling in his house for a year, to see how much trash he actually produced.  Considering I live in an apartment where the landlord does montly inspections and complains when I have a month’s worth of just recyclables in my closet, I doubt keeping garbage in addition to recyclables would not go over well.  However, this man’s also started a site with conservation tips, and other items of interest.  It’s worth checking out.

Now comes the task of defining my goal.  As a scientist, I have to be able to quantify data and say, “x will increase by y%!” so as to better evaluate my success.  Unfortunately, floating through the world in a willy-nilly fashion as I do, I have to beome more aware of what I am doing wrong before I can figure out how to fix it.  So for the rest of this month, I’ll probably just observe some of the green and not-so-green aspects of my life and how I can fix them.

Til then!

Compact fluorescent light bulbs by Phillips

Seems like today is a good day to go green! I wasted a ton of energy on the computer, which I suppose is bad….but I changed my lightbulbs today, which is probably good! One of the bulbs in the apartment I just moved into blew a couple weeks ago, so I went out to buy a bulb to replace it. In the interest of saving money and energy, I bought a set of compact fluorescent bulbs and switched the burnt-out bulb.

Today I realized that if I take all the non-CFL bulbs that came with the apartment out now, before they blew out, too, I would a) be conserving more energy, and b) I would be able to take all my long life bulbs to the next place with me (although maybe I should leave them, to ensure the next inhabitants use CFL bulbs, too!).

The only issue I have with these bulbs, which I don’t think I’ve had with other CFL’s in all my years of using them, is that they seem to take a while to warm up. I took two pictures for an example!

CFL bulb (leftmost bulb) right after turning on lightswitch compared to standard bulbs (center and left)

CFL bulb (leftmost bulb) five minutes after turning on lightswitch.

In the first picture, the CFL bulb is obviously dimmer, while it appears to be warming up in the second one. Like I said, this has never happened before in all the bulbs I’ve used, so I wonder if this is part of some new design or something….

What is this, the fourth….fifth blog I’ve started in the last year?  I finally learned enough css junk to make my last journal look the way I wanted it to, but then wordpress stopped working!  Why?  Much like how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop, the world will never know.

Today I got to sit in not one, but two presentations by Paul Gillin (http://paulgillin.com/). Fantabulous. I was impressed at how quickly he moved through topics, but still gave a good bit of info about them. He did the keynote this morning about using the various parts of the interwebs to attract people to your website and business/school. In the afternoon he did a workshop on actually setting up a blog. Having had a ton of blogs myself, I went to it not expecting to learn that much, but boy was I surprised. I quickly learned why, although I’ve had a ton of blogs, they’ve all sucked (note – that doesn’t mean this one won’t, it just means I’ll know why it does).

Basically, his presentation was like ROFLcon, only without the stupid (which looking at it, his two hours really would fit the actual content of the three-day idiot-fest).

So basically, even though Gillin’s keynote or workshop did not involve Randall Munroe or Ryan North in any way, it was still pretty awesome, and I’d like to hear him speak again.

Anyway!  Fun fact of the day.  According to National Geographic (okay, the dudes who do research and are then interviewed on National Geographic), Americans eat three cheeseburgers a week.

Did I say “fun”? I meant disgusting.

The video above is about the large carbon footprint a cheeseburger has. To me, that totally makes sense – cows have long been implicated in the increase of methane in the air (methane being a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide), and they are not only responsible for the beef end of the cheeseburger, but also the cheese end of it! And then there’s all the processing and refrigeration that has to be involved! So the large carbon footprint was not a shock. No. It was the realization that since I, nor many of the people I know, consume even one cheeseburger a week, there are Americans out there eating MORE than three cheeseburgers a week. Gyuh.

But anyways. The whole cheeseburger carbon footprint totally reinforces my “Kosher for the Environment” campaign! Which I’ve tirelessly pitched to countless (two) people! If you cut out either the cheese or the beef, it means less cow support and less footprint (much to the chagrin of some cats).

Ruminate on that for a bit!