Listen Up Y’all It’s (Office) Sabotage

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We recently moved offices for my “real” job.  So when we moved, we had vending machines installed.  With my little power and suggestions, I was able to get the snack machine lights removed today.  To keep people from thinking the machines are off, I created some signs and placed them on the machines.  I also created a little sign and put it above the coffee.  It reads, “Put sugar & cream in your cup before the coffee and you won’t need a stir stick.”  The nice touch was the old NBC PSA logo, “the more you know.” It’s a simple change.

Vending machines are tough, because they generally consume a ton of energy.  The energy consumption from non-cooled snacks like chips are easier to curb if you can get your vendor to turn the lights off in the machine.  Most of the energy from these machines all go into the lighting.  So that’s a quick win.  Soda machines that are refrigerated are bit tougher.  Apparently there are these retrofit things you can install - occupancy sensors - that will turn on and off the compressor.  So whenever the machine isn’t in use, the compressor shuts off.  If the machine is inactive for two hours, the compressor kicks back in and cools the machine to the proper temp and shuts back off.  That could save a lot of energy.  I settled for just having the lighting turned off.  That’s an energy savings of about $126/yr - or $10/mo.  The lights are on 24/7…not anymore.

 More info here…

Oh yeah…it’s sabotage because these little signs could go everywhere in the office to make people start to think about their choices…hrmm…what to place a sign on next?  Maybe drop signs around the city…

Green NYC: Our Holiday Pilgrimage

Over Memorial Day weekend here in the States, my wife and I took a little trip to New York City.  I had to go for work on the Tuesday and Wednesday after the holiday and I have a relative that had an empty apartment in Manhattan.  So we only had to pay for the flight for my wife and food when we were there.  What a score! 

The office space (for my day job) for our new New York office is right on Union Square.  Union Square is the home of the Green Market.  They have a farmers market there 4 days/week.  It’s amazing.  I can’t imagine going to work several times a week and having that much access to locally sourced food.  Below is a video from Current TV on a new restaurant kiosk in Battery Park.  Battery Park is where all of the tour boats to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty leave - so they have a ton of traffic.  The new restaurant is called Picnick and is an all organic/locally sourced sustainable.

Before the wife and I went to New York, we contacted our friends at Organic Works Marketing, Katie and Megan.  They suggested a ton of eateries, so we hit up a few.  I wish I had some pics of that, but I don’t.  We did hit up Candle Cafe - a semi-well known vegan joint.  I’ve never been to a vegan place and I was pleasantly surprised.  I had a vegan cuban sandwich and it was rockstar!  I also went to Gusto - the first USDA Organic certified restaurant. 

Anyhoo - here are some pics and a nice video.  There were organic dry cleaners everywhere - I wish I could find one by me…but then again…I don’t dry clean anything.

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Photo Gallery: Chicago Green Festival 2008

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Earth Day: How We Celebrated April 20

Our Earth Day weekend continued today.  Instead of attending any events, we spent most of the day at home.  It was over 70°F - which is amazing since it hasn’t been that warm since last October.  So lets get the day started.

First things first.  We had to have some breakfast.  Bacon and farm-fresh eggs - perfect…except that we were getting low on eggs.  After breakfast, I went outside to check out the back 40 because we had a day of yard work planned.  Yesterday, we ordered a mix of a half-yard of top soil and a half-yard of mushroom compost.  Luckily for us, they delivered on Sunday.  I was outside checking things out and I saw the truck come down the street.  For whatever reason, there is a house on the corner of a court in eyesight from our house that has the same house number.  So I sprinted down there and re-routed him to our house. 

A few weeks ago, I built a 4′x8′x12″ box for a raised bed.  Finally, we can fill it up to get ready for veggie season.  Instead of tearing the grass out, I made a “lasagna garden.”  A lasagna garden is when you take newspaper and cover the ground like you’re making lasagna - put the paper down overlapping and wet it down.  I did the math, thanks to some calculator via a Google search, and the box I made would hold almost exactly one yard of dirt.

Before we really got started moving all of that dirt to the back yard, we decided to visit our “egg guy.”  We found someone with local honey a few miles from our house.  One day we were picking up honey and noticed a stack  of eggs (it was winter, so the chickens weren’t out).  So now we have our egg  guy.  We pick-up about two-dozen eggs/week.  The best part - they only charge us $2/dozen.  Today we went over and they only had the eggs from this morning which weren’t washed yet.  We took them unwashed and will take care of that ourselves.  They also spun out some more honey for us as we were out.  The kids got to feed the chickens - so they got a kick out of that.

Anyway - the rest of the day consisted of moving a yard of dirt to our pretty little box.  We also did a lot of general yard work.  Then, as a Dunkin Donuts coffee lover, I rode my bike to pick up a nice iced coffee afer a long day of work.  The weekend is over and it was a reminder that earth day is everyday.

The Neighborhood Garden Project

Deanna Glick, a blogger for the multi-blogger blog (that I happen to read religiously) Green Daily, is starting a project with her friends called The Neighborhood Garden Project.  My wife, Kelly and I have been talking a lot about a home veggie garden and trying to plot our strategy.  Around the time we were first discussing it, I emailed our local town government and inquired about a community garden.  Nope - none exists.  I didn’t think much about it again.  This past Wednesday night, I went to Chicago Green Drinks where the topic was about farming and urban gardens.  Then this morning I was watching The Sierra Club Chronicles and it was all about community gardens.  Now I read about Deanna’s project.  It must be a sign. 

Like I said, Kelly and I have been talking about our forthcoming veggie garden for the past few months.  We have the usual perennials and shrubs now, but nothing edible.  I’ve had the itch for a long time and I think the past year of her reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and other eco-books has convinced her that it’s time to take action.  We had a CSA membership last year, but didn’t like it much.  This year, we decided in addition to our own garden, we’ll use the money we spent weekly on the CSA and combine that with what we spent at the farmer’s market to spend more at the local farmer’s market getting greens we want to eat, yet still helping out and eating locally.

I grew up on a small farm - I guess you could call it a hobby farm.  It wasn’t out livelyhood or anything, but it was a lot bigger than the 1/3 acre that I live on now.  We always had a very large garden with fresh vegetables.  I didn’t fully appreciate what I had back then.  We were locavores on the 100 yard diet.  We ate pork, beef, and a slew of vegetables all raised within 100 yards of the house (and even drank goat’s milk instead of cow’s since we had a goat to milk).  Although I moved away from that environment when I was 15yrs old, it makes me the resident farmer expert (even if I’m far from it).  To be honest, we’ll be relying on the little I know paired with projects such as The Neighborhood Garden Project and Katie & Chris over at Gardenpunks (and probably friends and family…and of course…Google).

The Neighborhood Garden Project is really intriguing.  It almost reminds me of EcoMoms that has been getting so much attention lately.  There are womens clubs, moms clubs, gourmet dinner clubs, bridge clubs and so on.  Now there is a group of women neighbors starting their own micro-garden club together.  It’s not your typical garden club where you learn about plants at a monthly meeting and have a plant sale.  It’s a hands-on social club. Deanna and her neighbors are starting a small community garden right in her own backyard - literally in on her property.  From the video, the project is in it’s infancy with the garden just starting out.  It’s going to be exciting watching her progress (and hopefully my own progress). 

In some urban cities of the country, there are eco-terrorists - or “green guerrillas” who go to a vacant lot under darkness and plant a garden. All of these ideas are very intriguing to me.  Behind my house there is a large dry retention basin.  Just beyond that is a stretch of land that has been on the city drawings to be a road since the 1970’s.   It’s still sitting there vacant.  Just weeds.  Should I contact the village and ask permission or just start growing stuff there?  What if I just scattered seeds there and see what grows naturally?  Hrmm… so much to ponder.  Good luck with your new club, Deanna.  I hope you start a trend!

The Neighborhood Garden Project

Source: Green Daily

Ireland Eco Village

Happy St Patrick’s Day!  It was a bit of a struggle of what to write about on St Patrick’s Day.  So I started doing some digging around and found this wonderful project called the Cloughjordan Eco Village.  Constuction on the village began on Earth Day 2007 on the 67 acre farm the group purchased.  Here’s the village map. 

The Village aims could generally come under the following headings [via TheVillage.ie]:

• Human Scale:-
  A place that can down-size the institutions that provide housing, food, waste disposal, transportation, health care, education, social interaction and democracy, and contain these systems in a community where direct human involvement in the institutions is promoted.
• A fully featured settlement:-
  The Village will provide as many of the services and products required by the residents itself. To this end a critical mass of about 132 households plus the existing population of Cloughjordan can allow for a fully featured settlement.
• Human activities that are harmlessly integrated into the natural world : -
  The Village will be designed around a permaculture concept that looks to nature for the models and structures of a living system
• A place supportive to healthy human development:-
  This is a balanced and integrated development to all facets of human life, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual
• A community that can be successfully continued into the indefinite future: -
  This is the cornerstone of sustainable development. If what we do today can be seen to have adverse effects down the line then we must cease. The Village must be viable for the next generation, so therefore it must offer to that generation a place that they can also sustain.

You know that my posts aren’t complete without a video, so here ya go:

Source: Cloughjordan Eco Village

Recycling: Plastics Primer

So you made a resolution to start recycling more or you think you’re doing a good job because you’re recycling all of your plastic containers.  Great - I applaud your efforts.  Question, though - do you know what plastics your garbage company actually accepts for recycling?  Do you ever look at the numbers on all of your plastics?  Have you ever wondered what the heck those numbers mean? 

Let’s do this.  Flip over that soda bottle or take-out food container and look for the recycling symbol with the number in the middle.  Now go ask your bestest friend ever, Google, for the website of your local town or your waste disposal company.  See what kinds of plastics they accept.  You might also want to ask Google where you can actually drop-off those plastics that your garbage company won’t collect curbside. 

Most curbside recycling programs only take #1 and #2 plastics.  It’s frustrating because we should be able to recycle all of these plastics, but its really hard to find someone to take them.  Try Earth 911 to see what you can recycle.  Want to know what to do with different items rather than throwing them away?  Check out the Lime site.

Alright - now that you have that down - lets look at the various types of plastics out there.  There are 6 and then a frankenplastic - #7. 

#1 PET/PETE - Polyethylene Terephthalate - Soda bottles, water bottles

#2 HPDE - High Density Polyethelyne - Toys, detergent bottles, shampoo, milk jugs, etc.

#3 V or PVC - Polyvinyl Chloride - PVC plumbing, meat plastic wrapping, shower curtains - these offgas a lot - very distinguished smell

#4 LDPE - Low Density Polyethelyne - Newpaper bags, grocery bags - take these back to the grocery store for recycling

#5 PP - Polypropylene - Yogurt containers, margarine tubs, sour cream containers, Tupperware, diapers

#6 PS - Polystyrene - Most people think this is styrofoam - it is - but that’s the expanded polystyrene.  Tons of take out food containers, plastic utensils, CD jewel cases

#7 OTHER - Any mix of 1-6 plastics

What Is Single Stream Recycling?

Ever wonder how your recycling gets separated?  Erin did.  I was asked about this very subject, so now you get to hear about it, too.  Most towns these days don’t have a different receptacle for each type of recycling anymore.  You throw your plastics in with your glass in with your cardboard in with your newspaper.  How does it magically get separated?  The answer, my friend, is elves.  Yes, tiny magical elves.  Okay, so maybe not. 

The process is called single stream recycling.   Throw everything together - it all goes into one truck back to the recycling plant.   Some of the benefits are simple.  The truck isn’t sitting idling emitting pollution at your house as long while it empties four different cans.  People are more apt to actually recycle if there is no sorting or storing of multiple bins involved.  The more people who recycle, the more material that can get back into the hands of manufacturers.

The same principal is used in many large office buildings.  You’re told by the building management that your trash is being sorted and recycled.  People are skeptical, as I always have been.  Single stream takes care of everything.  The sorting process is quite amazing.  I happened to be watching Eco-Tech on the Science Channel a couple weeks ago when they showed exactly how the process works (see the video below).  Of course there is some human intervention on the line, but the machinery is impressive.   At the M.R.F.  - Material Recovery Facility - they use a series of conveyor belt, tumblers, magnets, centrifugal force, gravity, and other ways to separate recyclables.  My favorite is the eddy current used to separate out the aluminum cans from the other items.  From how I understand it, the polarity of the magnets are reversed and this causes the cans to fly off the belt into a shoot. 

Watch the videos below for more info on how it all works.  Like the fact that an aluminum can has the potential to be made back into another can in as little as 60 days.  Pretty fascinating…at least to a geek like me! 

Eco-Tech Single Stream Recycling (meet MRF)

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My Weekend of Waste

So maybe I wasn’t being all that green this past weekend.  I hopped a flight to Providence, RI on Saturday morning to go see the Pittsburgh Steelers lose to the New England Patriots.  My flight went from Midway in Chicago to BWI in Baltimore to PVD in Providence.  I did buy a TerraPass to cover the carbon offset credits, but that doesn’t mean I necessarily feel good about it.  Kinda like driving a Hummer and buying credits, so it’s okay.  Most of my guilt from waste, however, hasn’t come from the flying, but from general garbage.

I want to give props out to Chicago and Baltimore.  There were recycling areas all over these two airports.  At BWI, I noticed a lot of recycling bins.  They were separated out, too - so paper, plastics, cans, glass, and regular old trash.  I happened to be waiting at a gate near one of the larger food courts.  While there were all of these recycling bins, I couldn’t help to feel like they were either under utilized or inappropriately utilized.  Say for instance that I went to McDonald’s.  The wrappers were covered with food debris.  Should I put them in the paper recycling even though they’re so dirty?  How about the cups?  What happens when someone throws in a #5 or #6 plastic?  Which plastics are accepted?  How are they weeded out?  I’m sure there is an answer for this that I just don’t know.

So it started out with this obvious waste at the airports and just went downhill from there.  Note to everyone out there - when you go to a public event like a NFL football game, try not to think about the disregard for the planet everywhere you look.  I think everything just goes in the trash.  I was in an all-access portion of the stadium.  I had free access to all the Gatorade, soda, and bottled water I wanted.  I couldn’t bring  myself to actually take a bottle of water, though.  I looked at them in disgust.  Then I would see bottles with one or two sips out of them just being tossed in one giant trash can.  Rolls of tape being thrown away that were half-used.  Articles of clothing and wristbands and gloves.  The list goes on. 

Maybe the world was trying to tell me something when I threw a plastic bottle of Gatorade away and it splashed up on my pristine white shirt.  Now it has a nice spatter of pink on the corner.  It’s not exactly the look I was going for.   Perhaps Mother Earth was trying to tell me to stop aiding in her demise.

Then I’d look into the stands and remember from other times how much litter there is.  People get drunk on beer - all in plastic cups - no longer in the old fashioned wax paper cups of years past.  Programs were strewn about.  Napkins.  Hot dog boxes.  Popcorn waste.  All of this gluttony running rampant. 

Sometimes the worst part of knowledge is that it leads to a total “Debbie Downer.”  The more you learn about cause-and-effect, the more you see it in everyday life.  The more depressing it becomes.  You have to walk the tight-rope of mental balance.  Its a struggle between feeling good about the role you are playing in making the world a better place and the role you are playing to go along with society because sometimes you’re forced to - even though you know that role is wrong.   

Anyway - thanks for listening to my weekend of waste. 

Cornfed America

As you can probably tell if you’ve been a SCREAM follower is that I like videos.   I generally find them compelling to get the point across.  I was watching Current TV about a month or so ago and saw a short video..err…”pod”…on our dependence on corn.  You heard me right.  Corn. 

The video will tell most of the story.  If you want to read more about GMO’s (genetically modified organism) and corn, go to this site.

You may notice that this video is Canadian.  So enjoy the PROcess.  I love a girl who says “aboot.”