April 2009 Archives

So we all know that taking disposable plastic bags from the grocery store is bad for the environment. We sometimes resort to paper bags, since they are more recyclable or reusable, but the problem doesn't end there. Eventually over 95% of plastic and paper bags are thrown away... or blown away to end up stuck in trees or suffocating dolphins. These days many stores, even Trader Joe's, choose to double bag larger loads so the problem is really only getting worse. Remembering to use "bring along bags" is hard and inconvenient, but there is a solution emerging, read on.

I'll be the first to admit that I forget my reusable bags from time to time, and sometimes I just get lazy. You've probably seen the bags I'm referring to, Safeway and other stores sell them and they're usually made of recycled plastic or cloth, even organic cotton cloth if you shop at Whole Foods. I got a couple free promo bags with the Toyota logo on them from the recent EDTA conference in Washington DC and one more from the NRDC in the mail. This type of green branding has become quite popular and the point I'm trying to make here is that anyone can get a reusable shopping bag, they're not exactly hard to come by, just hard to remember to use.

While these reusable bags are great for reducing plastic and paper waste and the environmental impacts of littering, they do tend to clutter up your passenger or back seat during non grocery related trips and honestly, I'm just not in the habit of checking my trunk before entering stores. Walking to the grocery store or going by bike would solve this problem, but not everyone lives within range. Furthermore, even when you're in the grocery store itself - before actually leaving, plastic bags and packaging abound. From vegetables to fruits and meats, plastic bags are everywhere and sometimes required for weighing and separating.

To address this seemingly inescapable problem, some stores have put out plastic bag recycling bins. I took the picture shown above at a Safeway in my neighborhood near San Francisco, and while it's a nice service to see, I highly doubt it's being offered nation wide. I live in one of the greenest states and cities in the country, but having been raised in Colorado (which is still fairly green) and visiting often, I know it's not like this everywhere. Furthermore, if people have a hard time remembering to bring in a clean reusable bag for shopping, how will they remember to bring in a bunch of junky plastic bags for recycling? I personally think it's more about branding and greenwashing than anything - but hey, progress is good.

You should know, plastic bags along with bottles and other disposables that don't biodegrade naturally, pile up in our oceans and kill hundreds of thousands of animals annually. Birds mistake colorful plastic for fish or jellies and naturally, they try to eat them or feed them to their young. Eventually these birds starve to death or suffocate. Virtually all ocean dwelling creatures are impacted in some way and in turn our seafood is contaminated. You can learn more about these effects in this 8 minute TED video by Charles Moore entitled Sailing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - take the time and watch it now.

So what are the options? I've already discussed the "bring your own bag" model. Anyone can buy one of these non-disposable cloth bags and as long as they remember to use it, things improve drastically. Unfortunately though, remembering is tough... there aren't any local impacts, people aren't ostracizing each other about it, yet. Grocery stores are still happy to ask "paper or plastic" but I believe those days are numbered. Let me compliment Trader Joe's for offering a weekly raffle to shoppers who bring their own bag. As someone who shops with his own bags regularly, let me just say, people DO notice when you bring your own bag and they DO react positively. A creatively decorated bag could even get you a date, or at least a few good looks from the preferred sex. Smart is sexy...

One company has created a smart solution to the BYOB model (bring your own bag...) and it has to do with packaging. Unlike the stiff recycled plastic bags that don't compact very well and the cloth bags that tend to be fairly thick, their bags are thin and nearly seamless. They actually resemble the shape and volume of a plastic bag. In doing so, these bags compact very easily and are much easier to store. The real innovation, however, is in how they are stored. One small stuff sack is included with either three or six of these thin cloth bags inside, and the stuff sack fills out to the size of a cup... So now instead of having junky looking dirty bags floating around your car or out of reach in the trunk you get several clean bags (because they're washable) inn a cup sized stuff sack that fits in your cup holder. Let me repeat that, the stuff sack fits conveniently in your front seat cup holder! Voila! No longer will you forget your bags in the trunk, no longer will your back seat be cluttered, no longer will you be reduced to a walking shopping billboard.

The company is called Olive Smart, as in "All Live Smart", and the bags are available in 3 and 6 packs for $24 and $39 respectively. While this may seem a bit expensive, remember that these bags are washable and you'll be supporting creative sustainability... We're all for it! If you know of other great solutions like this by all means please post them below, and please, take the time to bring your own bag shopping :)

While we try to focus on the more positive aspects of clean technology here at Green Home Authority, this is one question that our friends with beach houses just can't ignore. Over the past several years, even the past decade, scientists have hypothesized that global warming was indeed taking place and that CO2 trapped in our atmosphere would create a "greenhouse effect" which in turn would warm the earth... thus melting icebergs and warming the ocean.

Simply put, as land based icebergs melt they phase shift from a solid (ice) into a liquid (water) and run downhill into the world's oceans. This in turn causes the oceans to rise. Furthermore, as oceans warm, due to the greenhouse effect and warm glacial runoff, they expand and take up more space. So the issue of rising oceans is really hinged on global warming in two distinct ways, it's not just more water that's causing the problem it's also the temperature of the ocean itself.

Now, is global warming real? Yes, the atmospheric temperature on Earth is steadily rising and people are causing the rise by burning fossil fuels. Has global warming happened in the past before people started using cars and burning oil? Yes, the earth's atmosphere has warmed and cooled many times over the past several hundred thousand years. In terms of cooler periods scientists now have evidence that two asteroids hit the earth at different times. The first one killing off large dinosaurs and once again killing off woolly mammoth's and other "ice age" creatures. Researchers have able to find one crater as evidence just North of Venezuela (for the dinosaurs) and a rich deposit of nanocrystals (only formed by asteroids) in the south pole. The latest theory accounting for the lack of a second crater is that the asteroid hit an icy region of earth and thus did not leave a crater. Okay, so both of those events caused the earth to cool, when and why has it warmed?

The Earth has warmed several times throughout history as its rotational patterns have shifted and changed. This process is natural, and while still potentially damaging to Earth's ecosystems, it is not preventable. So is this recent phase of warming caused by the Earth's rotation? No, it is being caused by man, and what's more concerning is that CO2 levels today are higher than they have ever been over the past 400,000 years (as shown in the chart above borrowed from PBS). You may be wondering, how can we even know what the CO2 levels were that far back? Well, scientists have been drilling into ice sheets in Antarctica and pull out core samples (big tubes of ice). These core samples contain hundreds of layers of ice dating back hundreds of thousands of years, and the ice contains bubbles with prehistoric air... that in turn contains CO2. So these readings are very accurate and basically serve as irrefutable evidence of global warming.

Bummer, I know... So the next time your grandpa or says "bah, global warming isn't real, people can't do that kind of damage, we're too small" like mine does all the time... You can point him to the official United States Environmental Protection Agency website here which says that sea levels have already risen 5 inches in the past 100 years and are expected to rise up to 2 feet in the next 100. And that's just the EPA, many scientists estimate 2-3 feet of rise. Furthermore, the world community of researchers focused on glaciers have been shocked and amazed by the speed at which ice glaciers have been receding in recent years, much faster than first estimated.

Now I know what you're grandparents are thinking right now. Thank goodness I'll be dead! And you may even be thinking, sheesh, 2 feet isn't that big of a deal and I'm not going to live to 100 anyways. Well, it's actually more than it sounds like and it could happen a lot faster than we think. You see, as the ocean rises vertically one foot, it comes inland about 10 feet. So if  you live in India or many parts of Asia which are already at sea level, you are going to be displaced. Some places will be able to cope by using levvys (such as Denmark) but that cost's a ton of money and those systems are prone to failure. We'ere talking billions of people on the move as a result of changing landscapes. And what happens when billions of people are displaced? We could have war, but I'm hoping for one giant beach party! Another point worth mentioning here is that fresh water is going to be harder and harder to come by because those glaciers we talked about earlier (at least the ones in the Rocky Mountains) are where people in the US get a lot of fresh water. Without fresh water we will have to rely on desalination of ocean water, and that water will be increasingly polluted as oceans rise. Double bummer.

So if you have a beach house are you screwed? In my opinion, yes, you should get out of there quick or at least swap to a house that's a bit further back with roads going directly inland. I have already areas of Northern California near San Francisco (where I live) sliding into the ocean. One area called Devil's Slide was completely cut off when the road slid out into the ocean a couple years ago and now the state is spending millions to move the road closer inland by building a bridge and tunnel. The houses that line the cliffs there no longer have road access and people have to hike to get home each day. I've attached an aerial photo below showing the specific areas I'm talking about but the problem is happening everywhere along the coast, especially in Southern California. Now if you live in Colorado (where I used to live) it's easy to deny rising oceans, but it's not a very attractive trait. Who wants to be known as "Grumpy Grandpa" the one that denied it to the end and was really the source of most of these problems to begin with.

While the oceans are not expected to rise all at once and swallow up houses and coastlines like some kind of giant hurricane, storms are something to watch out for. If hurricane Katrina and others are any indication, changing gulf streams and other environmental shifts could devastate coastal areas such as Florida. The ocean currents that keep places like the UK livable are expected to slow down killing off millions of fish and making the dreary cold weather even worse. I personally think it's kind of ironic that Florida is such a popular place for grandpa types to retire, because it is poised to be under water within the next 100 years (or at least behind levys)... I just hope Mickey can swim, he didn't do so well in Fantasia. For more serious references definitely watch the new PBS NOVA special called Extreme Ice - and invite your parents or kids to join you. People can and will adapt, but I personally do not want to deny that a problem exists - taking personal responsibility and choosing to live more within your own means is a great step in the right direction. And remember, NOVA (the source of the videos listed above) is funded by the Public Broadcast Service which is run by our government and paid for by our taxes. They are as close to non-biased as you can get.

As a fan of NBC's hit show 30 Rock and a lover of the planet I enjoyed episode the fifth episode of season two entitled "Greenzo". David Schwimmer (Ross from Friend's) get's a new job promoting GE's green appliances in the form of a green superhero named Greenzo. Unfortunately, he goes overboard and begins insulting everyone about how gross their overconsumption really is and devolves into a self obsessed megalomaniac.

At one point in an intense standoff Greenzo confronts Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) with "Wait! What's in that styrofoam cup, huh? The Earth's blood? Gimme that!". Tragically, styrofoam cups and individually wrapped plastic utincils are still in high demand and use. These compounds are toxic to produce and nearly impossible to dispose. According to WikiAnswers it takes upwards of 50 years for a styrofoam cup to decompose... so what are the alternatives?

Thankfully, a whole new industry is "sprouting up" around biodegradable consumables such as forks, knives, plates, takeout boxes, and even water bottles! I first noticed this trend two years ago while working at the Googleplex in Mountain View California, the epicenter of cleantech (in the US). Google is well known for its employee benefits, free food, pets at work, etc. etc. but not so many people know that their takeout utencils are made of corn which is completely compostable. They have also have one cafeteria that only utilizes ingredients grown within 150 miles known as "Cafe 150". Recently Google also added organic gardens to their portfolio of green eating options. These gardens supply ingredients used daily to prepare meals at their main cafeteria.

These days it's not just Google clearing the way to a greener future in the food industry. Several local restaurants and corporations are jumping onboard as well. Hewlett Packard, for example has made an internal commitment to rid themselves of styrofoam coffee cups in break rooms and cafeterias. Microsoft has begun using recyclable silverware in their cafeterias. As a soccer Mom (or Dad) who serves up pizza and casserole you could also be making a difference. Instead of using Solo plastic cups and styrofoam plates for your next playdate or sleepover consider the alternatives being offered by the Dine Green Store. You can also do a bit of homework on your local restaurants and figure out which ones belong to the Green Restaurant Association. The GRA connects sustainable product suppliers and producers with consumers and restaurants providing a convenient way for all sectors of the restaurant industry, which represents 10% of the U.S. economy, to become more environmentally sustainable. Shown here are food containers made out of Bagasse, a fiberous resadue leftover material from the production of sugarcane.

It won't be long until Costco and Sam's club are offering these products in bulk, in the mean time check out the websites we've shared and keep your eye out for recyclable materials like Bagasse, Bioplastic, Corn, Bambu, BioPak Fiberboard, Clamshell, Organic Cotton, Recycled Paperboard and of course Recycled Paper. Share your own source of bio utensils and organic materials below.