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Being More Environmentally Friendly
Flay
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Considering the recent conclusion (and failure) of the Copenhagen climate-change summit, I think a thread regarding climate change and environmentalism is appropriate.
What I'm looking for is general advice on reducing my own impact on the environment. This includes (but is not limited to) reducing energy consumption, buying more sensible products, using fewer resources such as water and fuel and even as far as political activism.
So, collective consciousness of the PA forums, what environmental tips and advice do you have?
What I'm looking for is general advice on reducing my own impact on the environment. This includes (but is not limited to) reducing energy consumption, buying more sensible products, using fewer resources such as water and fuel and even as far as political activism.
So, collective consciousness of the PA forums, what environmental tips and advice do you have?
Flay on
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There are the obvious ones like walking, biking and taking the bus as much as possible, recycling as much as you can, composting, buying a hybrid car if you can't walk/bike/bus, buy energy efficient lightbulbs instead of incandescent, turn off all the lights in rooms nobody is using, wrap up in blankets instead of using a heater, turn your computer off instead of leaving it on standby (same for consoles)... a lot of little things, but they'll all add up
Do... Re... Mi... So... Fa.... Do... Re.... Do...
Forget it...
If you have something like a treadmill, donate that to someone and start jogging on your own if you can. If you have an MP3 player, a regular phone and a camera you just use casually donate all of those and switch to a smart phone, you won't have so many things requiring a charge and you don't have to worry about the batteries in your camera. Do things like that, oh and also unless you literally don't own a clock in your house, turn off things like the DVD player. There's no reason to keep those things on all the time, and if they still have a blinking light on when they're turned off then unplug them.
Yeah, I walk pretty much everywhere I can't get to by train.
Also, when in the shower and it's not freezing cold, I only turn the taps on when I need to rinse off. The taps are on for around 30 seconds total.
Don't worry too much about conserving water at the tap unless advised to do so during a drought or something. The amount of water consumed to produce things like the food you eat daily utterly dwarfs any amount of water that you use in your home.
Really though the most effective thing you can do is contribute somehow to eventual political solutions to environmental issues.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Similarly, if you don't make most of your food yourself, learn to cook. I don't want to come across as some crazy "rah rah raw veganism and raw foods diet" hippie, but generally speaking the more commercially processed a food is the more environmentally unsustainable it is. If you prepare food yourself from basic ingredients, you're cutting out a whole lot of extra steps in the processing chain, each of which has a non-negligible environmental footprint.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Hm, honestly haven't thought of it like that. I pretty much do it anyway, since I hate having the water constantly flowing when it's hot.
On the subject of vegetarianism: I've also heard that this is a particularly significant way to help the environment. Going completely vegetarian is out of my reach at the moment, but at the moment my family tries to eat around/at least two vegetarian meals a week.
What's the truth to this?
Generally speaking, if it helps products that currently exist see longer lives before they are discarded, it's helpful.
all you really do is pollute in slow motion, though. Which isn't a bad thing by itself, but if you're talking about an item that's a common used purchase (a car, say) buying a used one vs. a new one probably doesn't make that much of an impact since you're not reducing the overall demand for cars.
if stuff that would otherwise just wind up in a dump can be kept out of a dump though, go for it
vegan/vegetarianism is good because meat requires many more resources to produce than vegetable matter. The resources that produce one meat-cow can produce enough grain to feed a hundred times as many people, or something ridiculous like that (don't quote me on the factor, but the disparity is nuts.) This is true of many other animal products, although probably to a much lesser degree.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
And also some articles:
New York Times - Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler
BBC News - Hungry world 'must eat less meat'
Energy saving bulbs are a bit problematic, as someone already said. Not only do they contain mercury but you should only use them in rooms where the light will be on for long periods - Actually lighting them takes up way more power than a normal bulb does, so they can even have a negative effect on your power consumption if you turn them on and off all the time.
Also I think you can't use normal bulbs and energy saving ones in the same lamp.
And Disney World is nowhere in sight.
This isn't true.
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anyway, there is a slight surge of power when you start one of those lights but it's only equivalent to a few seconds of normal use. I think that myth got started by people confusing the economics of it - switching them on and off makes them wear out quicker, which can cost more in the long run.
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What can and cannot be recycled depends entirely on your municipality or private trash/recycling service.
You don't have to hire professionals to clean up the mercury if you break a compact fluorescent, and the OMG MERCURY! concerns are way overblown, given the amount of mercury in a bulb.
http://www.energystar.gov/ia/products/lighting/cfls/downloads/CFL_Cleanup_and_Disposal.pdf
Yeah, I was jut thinking about how I broke a mercury thermometer when I was a kid, and my mom wiped it up with a paper towel or something. That was about 500 times more mercury than there is in a lightbulb. Yeah, mercury is bad for you, but breaking a lightbulb isn't going to turn your house into a Superfund site.
I mean, what does the graph tell us? Maybe it went from people eating 1/3lb of meat a month to 1lb a month.
Anyway, two other smart things to do is to buy a more efficient shower head and hang dry your clothing instead of using a dryer. Dryers in particular are extremely inefficient.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
I pretty much ignored the stuff on the left. The more important part is the comparison of carbon emissions on the right.
With the exception of a straight razor, aren't all blades meant to be disposable? Even some straight razors use a disposable blade.
I've switched over to using regular soap lather and I've found it to be superior to most other shaving creams and gels I've used, so that's good advice on two fronts.
What should you use instead?
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
But yea, going whole hog requires a straight.
Brush+soap/cream+straight/safety razor
For brushes, your options are synthetic, boar, or badger. Badger is best, synthetics can be pretty good if you're vegan/vege, and boar is meh but cheap.
it's actually always a big deal here to conserve water - the continent of australia is pretty much in a perpetual state of drought, and the water we have is streched very finely. and people can get very heated over the issue.
i'd say continue to save as much water as you can. considering that the more water we use the more expensive, power-hungry water recycling and desalination plants will need to be built, it really is the thoughtful thing to do both for our local water supply problems and the international climate goals. also, you won't get murdered
flay - i'm in sydney, too - do you cook with a lot of veggies? every week my partner and i order a fruit and veg box from sydneyfresh.com.au. it's basically local, seasonal produce from a big sydney fresh food market delivered for free. i'm sure a lot of the stuff in there wouldn't adhere to the 100-mile diet (which is a great idea), but it's a good way to force yourself to use what's local and bountiful as opposed to the aseasonal, imported and waxy-looking 'perfect' stuff of a big coles or woolies
This isn't true at all. Transportation accounts for a relatively tiny fraction of the environmental impact involved in the production of food, with most of those emissions occurring in the last stage of transportation (that is, trucking it from the port to your grocery store). Given that most food transported is being transported on ships, this means that the environmental damage is minimal due to the quantity of stuff being transported at once.
Most of the emissions involved in food production occurs in the actual producing of the food itself, the growing bit.
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Or instead of that go to Lush and get one of their shaving creams. Shave The Planet is wonderful for my face.
Lush is actually a great place to go to help cut out the impact of personal hygiene. Mostly sustainable products that avoid using endangered animals/plants. Expensive though.
Do you have Parkinsons? Look, if people hundreds of years ago could shave with a straight, why can't you? You can use a computer and drive a freaking car!
On the Hybrid car note - not so much. There was a study a while ago that showed that because of the nickel mining and the way hybrid car batteries are produced (being shipped all over the world several times to different factories that do different processes) that Hybrid cars can be worse for the environment than driving a big SUV (the article specifically said than a Hummer.) A lot of people ignore the environmental cost of creating a product initially, and focus solely on its energy consumption, which is admittedly a large part of its total environmental cost, but not all of it. Diesel cars can often be more fuel efficient and less environmentally damaging to produce, although I do believe diesel is fairly dirty to burn, but from what I understand its much cleaner burning nowadays.
Supposedly Apple computers are built in environmentally friendly ways, use recyclable materials, and are low in terms of power consumption, so if you are buying a new computer it may be in your best interest to buy a Mac.
Also another thing to keep in mind is that there are many ways to recycle. If you are buying something new, stick the old one on craigslist. You might make some money, the person gets a good deal, and nothing new needs to be produced to satisfy their need. It is also more environmentally friendly than traditional recycling because it doesn't require any processing.
That said, its surprisingly easy to get down to around 150L a day. Average consumption here was well over twice that before we had a supply problem and water restrictions, but the restrictions actually encouraged behaviour changes that stuck even after they were ramped back. Little things like not watering the concrete when watering the lawn, watering less often and at more appropriate times, and doing laundry and dishes in larger batches all add up. Put a brick in your toilet cistern if it doesn't have that half-flush function, stuff like that.
Residential water demand may not be huge compared to industry even on aggregate, but as it grows it requires a metric shitload of construction to add supply and storage infrastructure, and concrete manufacture produces a lot of C.
And yeah, seconding turning off standby machines. That'll save you money, and the same infrastructure concerns apply to power supply. Turn the AC heating closer to external ambient, and only run it when you actually need to.