Updated Eco-Footprint

I went into this expecting no particular change in my footprint as measured by the global footprint network, because I didn't change activities measured by that particular test. and I was right!

I've gone from 4.6 earths to 4.8! How did that happen?

In fact, I seem to be using even more resources, probably because I can more accurately measure our family's electricity usage. That is still the major source of my impact; the amount of energy needed to sustain my lifestyle. Here, go look at my old calculations!

As or my three goals, I succeeded wildly with one of them: composting! I have composted diligently this quarter, even as the compost bin slowed down and... stopped composting.

I was only somewhat successful with the effort to keep the heat down: it got really cold outside and my mother would crank up the heat, and visitors would often complain of the cold, giving my mom the excuse to turn up the heat. I was also unable to convince my parents to put our electronics on power strips with switches. Perhaps next quarter I can swing it.

I also did not do as well as I expected with my walking, again because of the weather and the cold. I still walked to school everyday, and oftentimes for extracurricular activities, but I never walked to the store for groceries. I did walk to some restaurants in Fairhaven, but then I started driving to my late-night group meetings, because it was cold and dark and raining.

I will be able to continue what behaviors I implemented this quarter: I like composting, and having compost, and I enjoy walking to school instead of driving. I may be able to get the heat turned down now that the snow is gone, but that's not something I can really change at the moment. However, we have noticed that there are a lot of drafts coming up through the floor: we are hoping to get some insulation blown in in the downstairs garage and keep some of the heat in that way.

Resolutely Local

While I was researching ingredients for a local pie, I found this very complimentary and comprehensive article about Haggen's local food efforts.

Natural Food.net article on Haggen

Its interesting to see how they've historically supported local businesses like Wood's and Erin Baker's cookies, and the new initiative they've started with Western to give students 10% off. Check it out!

Pumpkin Session

This summer, on a whim, I picked up some pumpkin starts down at Joe's Garden, a small local farm located inside of the city. I was already planning to plunk some zucchini into an area I had reclaimed from the blackberries, and I figured pumpkins would do just as well.

The pumpkins are behind the zucchini plant, but they look the same at this point.

It took some dedicated watering, but the pumpkins started to grow. Then I went on vacation. And came back to this:

Pumpkin vine says "OM NOM NOM"

You can see our compost bin over there, being eaten by vines. Soon, I had four little green pumpkins on the vine, that started turning orange in September.

About two weeks before Halloween, I had picked two of the pumpkins and was waiting on the last two to ripen when one night, when the streets were ringing with the calls of drunk college students, someone stole one right off the vine. (The largest one of course.)

So I had three pumpkins that I promptly stuck on the balcony, out of the reach of any more pumpkin-smashers. I finally got around to processing them this weekend, just in time to completely miss thanksgiving. =)

The empty shell.  It was devoured.

I used this recipe to make a really tasty soup, made inside of a whole pumpkin. I didn't get any pictures of it full, unfortunately, so you'll just have to imagine a whole pumpkin filled with an onion, apple, chicken stock, cream and goat cheese, that was then blended inside of the pumpkin itself with some of the flesh of that pumpkin. Delicious.

Cooked and ready for the fridge.

While that was cooking, I split open my other two pumpkins and laid them on a sheet pan to cook a la Alton Brown. Cooked them for 50 minutes, then stuck them in the fridge to cool and then forgot about them for the next day and a half. Hahahaha.

The flesh was easily scooped out with a spoon.

This morning, I got them out, scooped out the flesh and stuffed it in the blender. With four pumpkin halves to process, it took four rounds in the blender, and then a little bit of extra help from the stick blender.

I bagged the puree and froze it in 16-oz portions, the perfect size for one pie. I got four portions out of two pumpkins, and a full half-sheet pan of seeds that I toasted up with some soy sauce and salt. Yum!

If I tried, I could probably make some very local pies out of this puree. Eggs from someone's backyard chickens, Twin Brook milk and cream for both the custard and the whipped cream. I could get some Bob's Red Mill flour and Tillamook butter for the crust, and if I were feeling really ambitious I could probably get the spices from the Spice Hut out on the Guide. Well, its unlikely that I'll go that far, but at least when we cook our extra turkey I'll be able to make a pie with my own puree.

That is a lot of puree for two little pumpkins! It tasted almost exactly like butternut squash.

Geek Squad Gets Green

There are a lot of ways to benefit from the coming green economy, even if its just helping consumers overcome their own hurdles.

Geek Squad Gets Into the Electric Car Business

Best Buy's Geek Squad is putting together a program to help prospective electric car buyers outfit their garages to accommodate the new technology and also run tests on the rest of their house to see what other adjustments they can make to save electricity: with the goal of saving enough that they could run an electric car on the deficit.

Cool.

Linkblogging Edition!

I thought that I would compile some resources for saving energy this week, for all of those people in our class who are looking to cut their energy bills.

First off is one of the first blogs I actively followed, Get Rich Slowly. While this is a blog about personal finance, not sustainable living, frugality is a recurring topic. To this end, there are articles about organic gardening, getting the most bang for your buck at the farmer's market, and lots and lots of articles about saving money by saving energy.


One excellent resource I found from that site was Michael Bluejay's Saving Electricity website. He has lots of specifics about appliances, heating/cooling systems, lightbulbs and even cost calculators for things like how much your dryer costs you per year. It costs my household at least $86 a year just to dry our clothes! If you take just a fraction of the advice listed on the website, you could save yourself a couple hundred bucks a year.

Assignment #7

 For this assignment I created a concept called "Black Friday Black-Out". The idea of this campaign is to encourage people to opt out of the Black Friday sales hype. Every year, stores stay open late and open early, sometimes staying open for 24 hours, using massive amounts of electricity to light and heat their stores for this one-day sale. To counteract and protest this wasteful display of consumerist culture, this campaign challenges people to turn off their TV and computer during 11/26/2010, turn out their lights and turn down their heat, and occupy themselves outside of their house or in low-impact ways. Some suggestions are going out for a walk, reading a book, spending time with families, going out to a local restaurant, etc.

Target Market: WWU students, particularly those already inclined to participate in something like "Buy Nothing Day". TM include males and females between the ages of 18 and 34, and administration and faculty, between the ages of 34 and 65. The TM is environmentally conscious and socially progressive.

Overall Objective:
 1.) Encourage people to opt out of the consumer culture fostered by Black Friday and similar sales.
2.) Reduce electricity usage by encouraging people to turn off the television and computer in order to get away from Black Friday advertising.
3.) Create a "black-out" on the day after Thanksgiving by encouraging people to turn off the television, turn off the lights, and go outside their home for the day instead of remaining inside with their electronic entertainments.



Creative Strategy: an emotional appeal, appealing to the rebellious feelings people may harbor against the endless onslaught of advertising.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_Nothing_Day
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_%28shopping%29

Enviromental Footprint Update

I've been trucking along on my environmental footprint goals. I've been quite successful at keeping up with my composting, even incorporating some of our paper waste into our kitchen compost and tossing all of our dead tomatoes and yards cuttings into the bin. When I spilled the tumbler last week I discovered that I had, in fact, been largely successful in the composting process and just raked most of the compost across the garden patch and left it there. Unfortunately, I still had to shovel back in all of the green/rotting tomatoes. Pretty gross.

(Speaking of gardening, I grew pumpkins this year! It was very exciting! And then someone STOLE ONE. RIGHT OFF THE VINE.)

I haven't been as good about reducing my car usage. (Not that I had much to reduce.) I have managed to walk to the store instead of driving a few times, but then I've recently started driving to campus for some of my evening group meetings. Its just so cold and dark out, I don't want to walk back! I still walk to campus everyday though, and even sometimes twice a day for clubs and other meetings. I use a tank of gas maybe once a month.

And now we come to my goal of leaving the heat off until the end of October.

Sigh.

I was doing really well, for a while. I was wearing slippers and sweatshirts all the time, I had blankets everywhere, I put the electric blanket on my bed to warm it up for 15 minutes before getting into bed.

And then my mother came home. She's been turning up the heat to over 70 degrees in the living room, keeping the baseboard electric heaters blasting and drying the air out. Even turning down the heat doesn't help, because the heaters keep working for another hour. I've managed to negotiate her down to 65 degrees, but sometimes I come home from school and the heat is blasting.

Oh well. At this point, I turn down the heat because its too warm, and I'm stashing blankets everywhere. The heat still stays off at night, and everywhere but the living room and the bathrooms.

On a slightly random note, the habit of turning off the lights when I'm not in the room is so ingrained that I will turn off the lights even when someone else is in the room. This has led to some awkward moments when I turn off the bathroom lights while my mom is in the shower. Sorry mom!

Jammin' Endeavours

One of my summer activities that is frugal and happens to be relatively green is canning. I tend to mostly make jam, but I've also made my own applesauce, conserve, syrup and chutney, all properly heat-treated and shelf-stable.

There are few ingredients to these things, and most of them are fairly thrifty and sustainable. Many of them I got from my own yard or local farms.

What I actually bought:

• 1 dozen half-pint jars (~$9, reusable!)
• Extra Lids ($3, reusable, but not for heat treating.)
• Extra Rings and Lids ($7, reusable! Until they rust.)
• 11 lbs Strawberries from Boxx Berry Farms (~$1.5/lb)
• 11 lbs raspberries from Bjornstad Farms (~$1.35/lb)
• 2 10 lb. bags of white sugar (~$8)
• 3 lemons ($3)
• 2 oranges (~$2)
• Walnuts and raisins(??)

What I did not buy:

• Several pounds of transparent apples.
• 5 lbs Italian plums
• Lots and lots of blackberries
• A big bundle of spearmint.
• More than a dozen pint/pint 1/2 jars, found on the side of the road during student moving season. =)

The results?

This doesn't include the half-dozen jars I've already given away or eaten.

• 4 pint and a half  jars of completely natural, local applesauce.
• Three pint jars of plum conserve
• Several half-pint jars each of strawberry jam, strawberry-raspberry jam, raspberry-orange jam, and lightly seeded blackberry jam.
• Two jars of mint syrup (which later needed to be watered down and made about 5 pints of syrup.)

 All made without artificial flavors or pectin, with the important ingredients coming from a 25-mile radius from my house. They make great gifts and keep so well that I'm eating though a couple of years worth of jam, and the jars can be reused for more jam, for leftovers, for random storage items. I use my leftover jars as portable coffee cups, yogurt parfait containers, as a pill container and as a toothbrush holder. until I need them for canning again.

So, in conclusion, canning your own food can be thrifty (after an investment in supplies) it encourages local shopping and saves the transportation cost of whatever kinds of foods you would normally buy at the grocery store. And you end up with a taste of summer when you crack open that jar of raspberry jam in the dead of winter.

Sustainable Seafood

Fast Company: Whole Foods Implement Seafood Color-Coded Rating System

This article talks about the new initiative Whole Foods has rolled out: labeling all of their seafood with sustainability ratings, with plans to phase out their "red-listed" or unsustainably harvested seafood by 2012.

 It is also an excellent example of the company taking responsibility instead of the consumer: it is possible to find out which kinds of fish in your area are or aren't sustainable or overfished, but its even easier for the company to research and educate their customer base about these kinds of issues, and then use thier pwer to negotiate with suppliers and eventually, lower the demand for these products.

This is something I would love to see implemented everywhere. At the moment, I only know of a few kinds of fish that are sustainable: farm-raised rainbow trout or catfish, which are both breeds that have low food conversion ratios and do well in inland pond environments, and Alaskan salmon and Nova Scotian lobster, both of which are well-managed and regulated industries.

Fortunately, a quick google takes me to the Monterey Bay Aqaurium website, which has a not only information on the issue of sustainable seafood, but also a set of pocket guides available to print out, varying by region of the United States, with the same rating scale that they developed for Whole Foods. Print one out and take it with you shopping!

*for anyone who needs ideas and article to write about, check out Fast Company's website and click the "Ethonomics" tab. A whole section devoted to sustainable and ethical articles!

Assignment #2 - Toxicity Assessment

Product: Bath and Body Works Midnight Pomegranate Body Lotion

Ingredients: Water, Glycerin, Petrolatum, Cetyl Alcohol, Ceteraryl A;cohol. Fragrance, Dimethicone, Ceteareth-20, Aloe barbendensis Leaf Juice, Avena Sativa (Oat) Meal Extract, Vitis Vinifera (Grape) Seed Extract, Tocopheryl Acetate, Pryus Malus (Apple) fruit Extract, Tetrasodium EDTA, Macadamia Ternfolia Seed Oil, Sodium Hydroxide, Disodium EDTA, Propylene Glycol, Ascorbic Acid, Diazolidinyl urea, Methylparaben, Benzyl Alcohol, Propylparaben, Carbomer, Alpha-isomethyl Ionene, Butylphenyl Methylpropional, Citral, Citronellol, Limonene, Geraniol, Hexyl Cinnamal, Hyrdroxycitronellal, Linalool, Red 33, Lake, Red 4, Blue 1

The ingredient I'm highlighting is Propylene Glycol, partlly because its in just about all lotions, potions and soaps, but also because you can actually go out and buy it at any soap-making soap. I happen to have a bottle of it.

 It has a hazard rating of 4/10 on the cometics database. it been linked to...

• Cancer
• Reproductive Toxicity
• Allergies
• Skin Irritation
• Organ System Toxicity
• and more!

On the ohter hand, all of these have "limited evidence" or "one or more tests" have shown specific results. In general, it is allowed in proportions of up to 50% in most cosmetics.

I probably will not replace this ingredient in my usual routine. it is pretty ubiquitous, and harmless at low doses, even when eaten.

Enviromental Footprint

Here are my results for my global footprint:

If everyone was like me, we would go through 4.6 earths! Most of that is made up of services, and most of the land I use is for energy.  However, according to them, there isn't much I can do. Following all of their suggestions (stop flying, eat less meat, recycle more, and take more public transpotation) would only get me down to 4 earths' worth of resources. It really doesn't take into account the fact that I walk everywhere.

But, to reduce my carbon footprint, I'll try these three things.

1) Start composting. I tried this over the summer, but let it go by the wayside. Its time to start again (and maybe empty it more often so it doesn't get as gross.) I also need to turn the composter at least once a week, and source some more dry goods to put in there.

2) Walk even more. I'll start walking to get groceries instead of driving.

3) Manage my electricity usage. The major source of electricity we use in our apartement is for heating and electronics. I can set up the electronics so that they are on a power flat with an easy-to-reach switch, so I can keep them from draining power when they are switched off. I also have a goal of not turning up the heat until the end of October. I'll close the blinds at night, open them on the sunny side in the morning, and make use of my sweatshirts, blankets, and slippers. I can also use less energy by using the dryer less and air-drying my clothes, and by taking shorter showers w/less hot water.