Trial and Error

I've been playing with our water heater's temperature setting over the past few weeks, seeing how far I can turn it down while still producing enough hot water for our needs. The goal is to save energy, since we don't really need to heat and maintain scalding hot water. Unfortunately, our water heater has notches instead of actual temperature readings, so I've been slowly turning it down a bit at a time.

Loos like I turned it down a bit too far last night and I had to suffer through a cold bath. Brrrr...

Green Remodelling

In the course of researching and working on remodeling our house, I've tried to keep things as green as possible. Green these days can mean different things to different people, and in my case it has meant focusing on health (particularly in-door air quality), efficiency (using less energy and water) and using renewable resources wherever possible.

Here are some specifics:

• Low-VOC paints (the Kelly Moore Enviro-Cote line). Our painter also did a bit of research and is using a high volume, low pressure (HVLP) spray gun to reduce overspray, which means less paint particles floating around in the air and more paint on the wall.
• More/better insulation - not only will insulation help reduce heating costs, but we're using UltraTouch insulation, which is both good for the environment (uses recycled denim) and better for your health (no VOC, no chemical irritants).
• New energy efficient windows.
• Energy Star compliant appliances:
  • New, high efficiency furnace.
  • New, high efficiency water heater.
  • New refrigerator.
  • New dishwasher.
  • New washer and dryer (there's no such thing as an Energy Star compliant dryer, but it's still possible to find a more efficient one).
• Using fluorescent lighting as much as possible.
• High efficiency dual flush toilets - replaced our old ones with Caroma Sidneys.
• Installed a hot water recirculation system. We used to have to run the water for several minutes before we got hot water in the master bathroom and it was a tremendous waste of water. I didn't want the hot water recirculation system running all the time either, since that would waste both the energy it takes to run the pump as well as the energy to reheat the cool return water, so I opted for a pump that runs on a programmable timer.

Note that our house is roughly 40 years old, and most of the appliances that came with it have probably been there from the very beginning.

At some point in the near future, I'm also hoping to install a PV system, and a smarter water sprinkler system.

Things I've considered but did not do:

• A gray water system - the issues surrounding this are still too murky (no pun intended), and Santa Clara township is actively warning people against any such systems
• An intelligent sprinkler system, one that'll check existing conditions before watering

Green Change #5

No more antibacterial soap. More specifically, no more triclosan. It's not good for us, it's not good for kids, and it's not good for the environment. I usually don't pay too much attention to this and just pick up whichever is cheapest at Costco, but that's going to change now.

Here's a simple write-up on why it's no good, and if that's too fuzzy for you, here's a more technical doc from the CDC.

Green Change #4

Been doing a lot of driving recently, and with the price of gas as it is, enough is enough. It's time I changed the way I drive and practice a bit of hypermiling:

1. slower starts
2. keep (closer) to the speed limit
3. keep tires inflated
4. ride my motorcycle more since I get almost twice the mileage on it than my car ;)

I've been trying to put this into practice lately and #2 is definitely the hardest. I've been able to keep it under 70 in my car, but on C's V6 Accord it's a bit harder.

As for #3, McCain's been in the news lately for being an idiot on this point.

Green Change #3

Time to do something that will require a bit more effort: no more paper cups. I'm a coffee fan, and while I'd love to drink coffee from a real cup, more often than not I find myself getting it to go, which means I end up using either a paper or plastic cup. This month I'm going to give that up as much as possible. This means being prepared and traveling with one of those travel mugs.

I've not quite decided yet if I'm going to go so far as to say that if I don't have my travel mug I'll just skip the drink. I'll have to play it by ear and see how frequently this problem crops up.

Harvesting Shampoo

We had a few friends over for some board games on Thursday and the conversation somehow made a detour into the topic of "harvesting" bottles of shampoo when staying at hotels. While this definitely qualifies as a very Chinese thing to do, I also pointed out that this wasn't very eco-friendly either. These mini bottles of shampoo are almost more plastic than shampoo, and collecting them means you end up throwing out way more plastic. I argued that not only should we not be harvesting them, we shouldn't even be using them -- just bring some shampoo from home.

If you don't want to travel with your Costco sized bottles of Shampoo, the best alternative is to fill one of these mini bottles with shampoo from home and just carry that around instead.

The most unfortunate thing about the recent decision by airlines to charge for checked bags is the spate of news articles discussing how to pack light, with an emphasis on disposable items. Today's San Jose Mercury News' Travel section's front page had the following tips which made me groan:

• For overnight trips, use half-sandwich size baggies to pack squirts of soap, shampoo, etc. and toss them when done.
• Just bring the basics and a small allowance to buy inexpensive things at your destination. I assume if you couldn't bring it with you, you're not taking it home with you either, so that's more trash generated.

Green Change #2

Hmmm... I kind of skipped over May, didn't I? Well, this'll have to be a double header then. After noticing the strange recycling practices at Whole Foods, I sent them an email asking them what the deal was and actually got a response back. They do recycle, but apparently shoppers just do not understand the difference between compostable trash, recyclable trash and everything else. Since things just got mixed up in the different bins anyway, they've resorted to sorting the trash themselves in the back and will be getting rid of most of the different trash cans in favor of a generic one. So they still get points for recycling, but I think it's a shame that they're not taking the opportunity to educate their shoppers.

Which leads to this month's change: recycling. I've always tried to recycle as much as possible, but it turns out that recycling is a tricky business. Exactly what's recyclable and how things should be sorted varies from town to town, but it looks like Los Altos has some fairly simple rules. Things I didn't know until I started doing some research:

• Polystyrene (e.g. styrofoam packing blocks (but not styrofoam packing peanuts) and take-out containers) can be recycled!
• Clean aluminium foil and pie pans can be recycled!
• Oil filters can be recycled! This matters since I change my motorcycle's oil and oil filters myself.
• It's important not to contaminate what you want to recycle. For example, no oily pizza boxes and rinsing food and beverage containers. I sort of knew this before, but am usually too lazy to clean containers before throwing them out.

The flip side of recycling is to just generate less trash. The one thing I find myself throwing out on an almost daily basis is junk mail, and I've been trying to eliminate that as much as possible. One of the best services I've found to do this is Catalog Choice, which seems to be doing a pretty good job of slowing the flow of junk into my mailbox.

We've also switched to getting milk from the Strauss Family Creamery. Not only does it taste great, but they use glass bottles that can be returned to them for re-use.

Finally, C's doing her bit as well, as she's started composting a few weeks ago, and seems to be having quite a bit of fun doing it too.

So the goal here is to reduce the amount of garbage I produce, and recycle as much as possible.

Recycling

Recycling is a great idea, but lately I've been noticing a lot of problems when trying to put the theory into practice.

Things that make you go hmmm #1: I was at the Whole Foods in Cupertino a couple weekends ago and was throwing out some trash after lunch and was happy to see that they had trash separation for both regular garbage, compost, and glass/plastics. Shortly after I threw out our refuse from lunch however, an employee came by and collected the garbage from these separate cans and just threw them all into one large cart. The separated trash wasn't bagged, it was just mixed together in the big cart. Seriously, what's the point of even having separate containers if you're just going to mix them up anyway other than to fool customers into thinking that you care?

Things that make you go hmmm #2: I'm at a conference at the Moscone Center in SF right now and they have water coolers scattered around instead of bottled water, which seems like a good idea. But then right next to some of these water coolers, they also have garbage cans marked "compost". Of course, no one else seems to care and just throw out their plastic cups into these garbage cans. While you can accuse these people for not paying attention, I think more blame goes to the organizers for not having the right trash cans in the right locations, because they do have plastic recycling receptacles as well.

Earth Day

Today is Earth Day. What have you done for your planet lately?

Personally, I've been trying to use less whenever possible, recycle as much as is feasible and curbing my more materialistic tendencies. I've also tried educating my friends and family, but there's a fine line between educating and nagging or preaching and I'm always struggling to figure out where that line is.

For example, how can you persuade a new mom that buying a second hand stroller is just as safe as buying a new one? You're basically arguing against an emotional response, and there's no winning that one.

Lately I've been thinking more and more about what concrete changes I can make in my day to day life, and I've been inspired by Vanessa's experiment to do one thing a day that betters the environment. Since I know I won't be able to come up with something new every day, I've decided to try something a lot simpler: something new every month. And hopefully, if this sticks, I'll switch to something new every week. We'll see how it goes, but once a month is something anyone should able to do. And whatever that "something new" is, it will continue to get done from then on. If I decide to stop using something, that change is permanent.

For this month, I'm going to stop using paper towels in the kitchen and reverting to good old fashion cloth towels. We never used them before we moved to the US and survived just fine, so I'm pretty sure that habit won't be too hard to break.

If you're thinking of making a change, here are 50 simple things you can do.