Happy Earth Day: Be Part Of The Solution

Earth Day 2008: E-Waste Disposal Event

1-800-GOT-JUNK is holding nationwide events on Saturday, April 19th for Earth Day to collect and recycle e-waste. ” 1-800-GOT-JUNK? is committed to keeping communities clean, and hazardous junk out of our landfills. We will be out in numerous communities across North America offering free e-waste collection.* We have teamed up with various electronic waste recyclers and together will properly collect and recycle thousands of pounds of e-waste on this one day.”  They charge a nominal amount for disposal of TVs and monitors in some locations.

In Chicago, you can take your computers to the Goose Island Household Chemical and Computer Recycling Center for recycling year-round.  They also take televisions and cell phones (and of course, household chemicals like paint).

Many Goodwill stores will accept computers free of charge where they will recycle what they cannot sell.

Some Catridge World stores will accept e-waste free of charge.  Call the store first.

Dell and Apple will recycle anything they make.  Apple will also take cell phones for recycling free of charge.

Still not sure where to dispose of something?  Check out Earth 911.

Source: 1-800-GOT-JUNK

Boo: Cotton Industry Commercial

Cotton Commerical - Goodbye

The commerical says, “Goodbye Mystery Fabric, Hello Cotton.” Great. That’s not the message I saw when I watched it. I saw people throwing clothing - usable clothing, good clothing - in the garbage. According to this article, over 145 billion pounds of recyclable clothing is sent to landfill each year. So many useful items that could have been donated to a resale/thrift store. Goodwill takes unsaleable textiles and sells them to textile recycling centers.

Annually, textile recycling removes 2.5 billion pounds of consumer clothing waste headed for landfills. This is an average of 10 pounds per American, but it barely puts a dent in the amount that goes to waste.  Almost half of the garments reclaimed by textile recyclers are exported to Third World nations to clothe the world’s poorest people.

We’re not even going into traditional cotton (which uses about 25% of the  all insecticides).  If you want to read stats on cotton - this is a good resource.  Anyway - watch the video above - lemme know what you think?  I don’t think it’s a very good message…I know that I’m probably being too nitpicky.

Source: North Texan Online

My Baby Tree, Google Earth, and WWF

Google, Google, Google.  How I <3 ye.  Earlier this month we talked about how Google Earth is teaming up to show the effects of mountaintop removal mining.  Now we get to talk about something from the Google Earth Blog.  My coworker, Bridget sent me this on Facebook. The original WWF - World Wildlife Federation - has a new site called My Baby Tree.

Big deal - another charity planting a friggin tree  - dime a dozen (or is that greendimes a dozen? - yes - cheap horrible ecogeek joke).  So you go to their site and buy a tree which will be planted in the Sebangau National Forest in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia.  You can feel good for helping reforest the planet.  But wait, there’s more!  If you’ve never used Google Earth, it’s a sweet program that  you install on your computer (originally called Keyhole if you’re keeping score at home) - so slightly different from Google maps.  People can give you files to open in Google Earth which will take you to a specific spot - KML files.   So you buy a tree and the WWF gives you a KML file when the tree is planted so you can virtually watch the growth of the forest you helped create.

P.S. I have to apologize for the lack of posts this week.  I’ve been down-and-out with the flu.  Boo flu!

See how MyBabyTree.org works:

Source: Google Earth Blog, Bridget from work

Bush Asked About $4/gal Oil

Today at a press conference, the soon to be former President, George W Bush was asked what he thought about the predictions by many experts of $4/gal gas prices. Maybe Bush was trying to do his best Borat impression. I think he thought in his mind “wha, wha, we, wha???” when he responded, “Wait a minute, what did you just say?…That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that.” I immediately thought “WTF?” Where have you been hiding? You had no idea that gas prices could hit $4/gal this summer when the price of oil is at $102/barrel? It’s like the groundhog poked his head out of the ground to see his shadow and now we have 11 more months of an idiot.  Then no more than four minutes later when asked where money for his presidential library is coming from he said that the deal was just announced and his attention has been focused elsewhere “like gasoline prices.”  So he’s been focused on gas prices, yet he doesn’t know what the price of gas is or the potential for it to rise?  Interesting.

I think you really need to watch the videos to see the response for yourself. To see the arrogance on how he answers the questions. How does he think the country should react? “Make the recent tax cuts permanent.” Then he went on to tell us that we need to build more refineries here and drill ANWAR and find more oil. Maybe he thinks the term locavore applies to drilling for oil?

Skip to 7:25

Then continue here

Source: CNN Money

(Not) My The 11th Hour Review

Last night, my wife and I saw one of the only Chicago-area viewings of The 11th Hour.  I’m not going to give you a full review here.  You can watch it for yourself either at a viewing or when it comes out on DVD on April 15th.  By the way, I pre-ordered the DVD - it’s only $5.  Buy it and donate it to your library after passing it along to all of your friends (I bought it for under $5 and that includes free shipping from DeepDiscountDVD).  I wish that this film had hit a larger market, but the fact of the matter is that another film is titled The 11th Hour and DiCaprio’s group is in litigation over the title.

I will tell you that this is not An Inconvenient Truth.  It’s not Leonardo DiCaprio talking for an hour and a half.  It’s not a sensationalized film.  It is a series of interviews on various topics with the top environmentalist and scientists talking about climate change and the things we do in this world that are detrimental to the planet.  They also talk about what you can do as an individual to make a difference.  If you want to see some of the indivuals involved, go to the 11th Hour YouTube group.  There you’ll find time capsules from many of them.

What I can tell you is that you hear all the time is vote with your dollars.  Everyone needs to stop looking at the world as a disposable entity.  If they do that, then perhaps they might think twice about disposable consumption.  This kinda goes back to Bill McDonough’s Cradle-to-Cradle initiative, too (yes, he’s in the film).  C2C is a design certification where the product will be go back to its basic elements at the end of its useful life versus the alternative, which is Cradle to Grave (landfill).

The 11th Hour Trailer

Water, Water, Water: What I learned

I find myself in Wheaton, IL at the Rice Campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in the atrium of the building.  Tonight there is a free event with the man behind the company that put the infamous green roof on Chicago’s City Hall, James Patchett of Conservation Design Forum, Inc.  As I look around the lobby, I see many people who seem to be twice my age sitting enjoying disposable snacks - far from sustainable (I can safely say that this is not your eco-speed-dating crowd).  Not only are the aluminum cans of Diet Coke available, but the ever-evil bottled water.  How can you call yourself an environmentalist and enjoy bottled water anymore? I, myself, indulge in a Diet Coke.  I’m only human and can’t resist the artificial sweetener and caramel coloring.  There aren’t even recycling bins anywhere to be found.  It appears that I will have a crushed can in my pocket to take home as a souvenir.  At least I have something to write on my evaluation form and the event hasn’t even begun.

Water, water, water.  That was the theme of the night.  Jim spoke for two hours and had to even speed through things to get finished.  You know you’re listening to a good speaker when you sat there for two hours and it felt like 15 minutes and you just wanted to hear more.  I don’t even know where to start, really.

Water is going to be, and really already is, a huge issue.  The UN even stated that by 2025 two out of three people in the world will face water shortages if current consumption rates keep going as they are today.  People can live without oil.  Water is a necessity.  The water waste here in the United States is unfathomable, really. 

We’ve either paved the earth or filled it with turf grass.  “What’s wrong with that?”, you ask.  Well first of all, we’re not paving the earth with porous or permeable concrete.  The water has no where to go.  So we create storm sewer drainage to carry away the water rather than letting the earth breathe naturally.  As the water travels from roads and driveways, etc., it collects contaminants.  Eventually all of that water has to go somewhere.  So it goes into streams and lakes and rivers and estuaries and wetlands that we try to restore.  The problem is that these natural resources are being destroyed.  Native plants were never meant to live in these conditions. 

Turf grass and beautiful lawns are another issue.  I’m not totally anti-grass, but people have to be aware of the consequences.  The old law comes into play: “for every action, there is a reaction.”  A natural untouched habitat from the glacial periods to today will flourish in periods of drought or hard winters and so-on.  The top of the hill might be wet and the bottom might be dry.  Natural springs come from beneath the earth below the frost line and trickle to the surface.  Dew and rain water soaks into the ground and the dense root structure.  The plants grow strong and retain moisture and collect that moisture even in times of drought conditions. 

So what do we do?  We take these lands and grade them.  We take all of the topsoil that has any redeeming value from the farm land and push it to a corner.  We run bulldozers all around the land flattening it and grading it to spec.  We get rid of the good topsoil selling it off or giving it away and bring in new topsoil to the required 4 inches.  So now you have a minimal amount of topsoil on top of clay.  The top of the hill is dry. The bottom of the hill is wet.  So we plant a non-native plant like Kentucky Blue Grass which has a shallow root structure and is a cold-weather plant.  The spring thaw comes and everyone’s lawns look lush.  By the heat of the summer, if you’re not watering your lawn (with potable water, most likely) the grass starts to burn out and die.  Grass is delicate in the fact that too much water and the grass dies.  Too little water and the grass dies.  So then sometimes you have storm sewer grates in your lawn which is just ridiculous.  We should be able to easily take on several inches of rain and the ground absorbs it fine, but that’s not the case.

Another ludicrous thing that Jim Patchett pointed out is that we are obsessed with our lawns.  We dump all kinds of fertilizers with high concentrations of nitrogen on them.  The nitrogen really just helps green up the grass and doesn’t promote much root structure.  Then 40-60% of that nitrogen washes away from your lawn into the groundwater systems.  Magically with all of the water and fertilizer, our lawns start to grow.  Uh oh - time to get out the lawn mower because we don’t want the turf to actually look like it is growing.  Lawn mowers are responsible for about 5% of CO2 pollution.  God forbid there be any weeds or we have to go out there and dump more chemicals on the ground.  He also mentioned a 1987 study by the National Cancer institute, a child living in a household using home and garden pesticides has a 6.5 times higher risk of contracting leukemia.

There are some things you can do, however.  Aside from xeriscaping your property, which is a little extreme, but might be right depending on where you live, there are some things you can do to manage storm water.  We’ve already talked about permeable pavement.  Green roofs are gaining a huge momentum here in Chicago.  Mayor Daley went to Germany and got the idea and had to have one.  When Chicago City Hall was completed with half of a green roof, the temperatures on a hot August day were around 90F versus 169F on the normal black tar roof side.  Most air conditioning units draw their air from roof top units in city buildings.  They are much more efficient if they have to cool 90F temps versus 169F.  The green roofs also absorb the rain which keeps the plants growing and then the water evaporates back into the sky.  In Germany, there is an ordinance about dealing with storm runoff.  Basically, you’re taxed based on how much water goes into your sewers.  You really don’t have to do anything to your house, but you’re going to pay for it in your pocketbook.  Other simple items you can do at your own home include rain barrels and cisterns for irrigation.  We’ll go into more solutions in depth in future posts. 

I’ll leave you with the same parting fact that Jim left us with.  30% to 60%  of all potable water in the United States goes towards watering our lawns depending on where in the country you live (east coast versus the arid west). 

Let the earth breathe.

Second Verse, Same As The First - Thanks, W

I’m sure all of you sat on the edge of your seats watching GW’s final State of the Union speech.  If you missed the speech, it went a little like this, “Blah, blah, blah… (goofy smirk, clap). Blah, blah, blah… (goofy smirk, clap).”  The written speech that is distributed and is on WhiteHouse.gov even has the (applause) built-in.  Anyway - as far as energy and the environment are concerned, nothing is new in GW’s speech. He’s touting the same energy policy year-after-year.  I don’t totally disagree with him.  I guess I might sound a little bitter.  We do need to do some of these things.  I’m just saying that we need to start walking-the-walk.  Here, read for yourself (or watch below).

To build a future of energy security, we must trust in the creative genius of American researchers and entrepreneurs and empower them to pioneer a new generation of clean energy technology. (Applause.) Our security, our prosperity, and our environment all require reducing our dependence on oil. Together we should take the next steps: Let us fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions. (FutureGen is underway in Illinois) (Applause.) Let us increase the use of renewable power and emissions-free nuclear power. (Applause.) Let us continue investing in advanced battery technology and renewable fuels to power the cars and trucks of the future.  (this is happening, just not fast enough) (Applause.) Let us create a new international clean technology fund, which will help developing nations like India and China make greater use of clean energy sources. And let us complete an international agreement that has the potential to slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases. (Applause.)  (Umm - you mean like the Kyoto Protocol???)

This agreement will be effective only if it includes commitments by every major economy and gives none a free ride. (Applause.) The United States is committed to strengthening our energy security and confronting global climate change. And the best way to meet these goals is for America to continue leading the way toward the development of cleaner and more energy-efficient technology. (Applause.)

John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace USA, stated, “Tonight’s speech contains no new initiatives on global warming. Instead, the president recycles more of the same: more subsidies for dirty coal and dangerous nuclear power.”

“Under his watch, greenhouse gas emissions have increased as the United States’ reputation has plummeted. The damage to both the environment and the U.S.’s international standing will take years to undo,” he said.

“President Bush will be remembered not for vision or leadership in a time of climate crisis, but for leaving America out of the race for innovative solutions. Greenpeace applauds the president’s address tonight not for its style, substance or eloquence, but for the fact that it his last.”

I don’t get how we’re the wealthiest nation in the world and we aren’t making bigger changes.  The US is a major part the environmental/climate change/ghg problem.  The statement Bush basically made about a new treaty boggles me.  Lets worry about ourselves first.  We can start making the changes here whether or not the rest of the world joins us.  In fact, we’re behind the rest of the world.  Australia finally signed the Kyoto Protocol.  Iraq even  just signed the Kyoto Protocol. 

IRAQ!  The country we bombed and took down their government.  Even they have signed the Kyoto Protocol.  We’re behind Iraq!  How crazy is that? 

Source: White House, Environmental News Service, Grist

Sundance Film Fest: Fields of Fuel

The Sundance Film Festival is showcasing a number of “green” movies this year.  First up is Fields of Fuel.  They finally got the trailer up on their site the other day and you can see it below.  Now, I’ve heard rave reviews so I was excited about finally watching the trailer.  The only thing was, I could exactly tell what the movie was going to be about after watching it.  I’m pretty sure its about biodiesel from the one picture of the biodiesel gas pump and the fields.  When I first saw the fields and talking about our oil addiction, I was really concerned that it was going to talk mostly about just plain old ethanol. Maybe its a first edition trailer?

IMDB tells us: The film tells the story of biodiesel, an alternative fuel for diesel engines. Made from vegetable oil, it is non-toxic, has low carbon dioxide emissions and can ultimately replace all liquid fuels used in the United States, thus freeing America’s dependence on oil needed for gasoline. 

I’d really recommend checking out their daily Sundance blog.   Will this ever make it out of indy status and be distributed?  I’d love to give a review myself, but maybe I will one day when I get to see it.  I do have Everything’s Cool on the old DVR - that was the standout eco-flick from last year’s Sundance Film Festival.  Look for my own review on that very soon.

Variety: Fields of Fuel Review
CNET Review

Learn more about Biodiesel
(more…)

Green Drinks Virgin No More

I can proudly proclaim that I am no longer a Green Drinks virgin.  I’ve officially attended my first outing.  Maybe I should explain what Green Drinks is in the first place?  Well - since you asked…  Green Drinks was founded in the UK in 1989 by a green designer. It was originally founded as an informal gathering where people with interest in the environment and all things green can get together and share ideas and drinks. There are currently events regularly in 312 cities worldwide.  So check your local listings…or Google…or just start your own.

Green Drinks in Chicago began in February 2003.  Yes - for five long years, green drinks has been going strong here in the Windy City.  The events average around 75+ people and are now semi-monthly.  One meeting per month is a general focus while the other is aimed towards green business. 

Once I decided to finally bite the bullet and go - with the encouragement of my wife - I had to decide what mode of transportation I was going to take (although I knew immediately what I really had to do).  I live about 40 miles from the city of Chicago, yet I work downtown.  Luckily I had a couple things going for me.  One was that I already have a train pass paid for since I do go to the city via train every weekday.  The second is that the Green Drinks event is only about a 10-15min walk from the train.  The downside is that the train only runs hourly after a certain time and it makes every single stop.  I could easily drive to work and park.  Then driving home would potentially be very quick since it was way after rush hour.  Finally, I opted for the train for a couple reasons.  One is that  I’m cheap and the train is already paid for.  The second is that it seems a little hypocritical of me to drive to Green Drinks when I can easily take mass transit.  The third is that this is Green Drinks for crying out loud - maybe I could get a nice buzz on and learn about the environment and sober up on the train. 

So - I know what you’re thinking now - you want me to set the scene of me losing my Green Drinks virginity.  Break it down, yo.  First off, it begins at 5:30pm and your asked to donate $5 to the cause.  Not a problem.  5:30-6:45pm is for networking and getting your initial buzz going - which gives you the liquid courage to talk to even more strangers.  At 6:45pm the festivities begin.  There is usually a speaker on one or two topics.  Tonight was a little different.  The allotted time was one hour and there were 7 speakers to get through.  Each were given 7min to speak.  That left a little time for introductions and the initial MC by Peter who runs Foresight Design and Green Drinks Chicago.  During the speakers you can order some eats and drinks and sit back and relax…or take notes like me.  Then when the speakers are done, you can continue networking until 8:30pm or whenever everyone decides to leave.  Pretty simple.  There is also a table full of all kinds of good materials brought by the participants.  So you can find green businesses and all kinds of different initiatives going on in the area.  I have a nice stack of things…and no doubt I’ll be writing about them in a blog post soon.

Tonight’s episode of Green Drinks focused on the State of Sustainable Chicago with seven different organizations presenting.  The organizations involved this time were: Illinois League of Conservation Voters, U.S. Green Building Council - Chicago Chapter, Illinois Environmental Council, Openlands, Chicagoland Bicycle Federation, Access Living and Jobs With Justice.

I look forward to attending more meetings (I sound like I’m in a 12-step program) and seeing one that isn’t so schizophrenic.  Don’t get me wrong, I did have a good time and it was totally worth it.  It always feels good to go to those things and they’re not just filled with a stereotypical hippie treehugger, but people from all walks of life.  It makes you feel normal - like you’re not the odd-man-out.