New Scientist has an interesting article on the “Five eco-crimes we commit everyday.” Most are not very surprising, but the details are interesting, such as the fact that the western world wastes one third of its food!
Egregious as this waste is, the means used to produce and procure much of our food is more important. To this end, Slash Food has a brief post highlighting some better seafood choices including local award-winning business Aqua Australis.
Also released this past week, a study of food sustainability revealing that, surprise of surprises, the devil is in the details and “food miles” are an over-simplification.
One of the first home improvements Rachel and I made when we purchased our condo here in Cambridge this spring was a solar hot water installation on our rooftop.
The system we had put in uses vacuum tubes, a newer, more efficient type of solar collector than the black box flat panels of old. As a writer covering energy and the environment in Cambridge and China, I’d spent the past three years tracing this new and exotic technology back to the factories and cities in China where they are surprisingly commonplace.
I first read about the tubes three years ago in a story in the Boston Globe. A family in Newbury, MA was using a massive installation to provide hot water and heat for their giant barn of a house. A photo that went with the story showed their installation covered in frost on a cold winter day. Somehow, despite the cold, the tubes were still kicking out 120 to 160 degree water. The secret behind vacuum tubes that allows them to work just as well in winter as summer is, just as their name suggests, a vacuum space. The diagram at the right shows how the tubes work. Sunlight passes through a clear outer glass tube and travels through an evacuated space or vacuum where all of the air has been sucked out. The sunlight passes through this vacuum and then hits an inner black pipe that absorbs the sun’s rays converting the sunlight to heat. What’s key about all of this is that whereas light rays can pass through a vacuum space, heat can not. All of the heat is therefore trapped inside by this highly efficient, transparent insulator.
After I read the story in the Globe I found out that there are thousands of factories kicking out these tubes in China and roughly 1 in 10 Chinese people use them for their hot water.
Six months after first hearing of the tubes, I toured the R&D center of one of these factories in Beijing for a story I wrote for New Scientist.
The story also led me to Rizhao, a city on the coast between Beijing and Shanghai where 99 percent of residents get their hot water from the sun. Here is a video I made from a rooftop of the city while talking with Rizhao’s mayor, Li Zhaoqian.
By the time we had a chance to buy a place of our own I was totally sold on the technology and couldn’t wait to put the tubes in on our own place. Evacuated tubes are still hard to come by in the US, however, and most of the installers I spoke with insisted they were no better than the flat panel solar collectors that had been around since the 70s. The estimates I got for flat panel installations, however, were twice the size of what I figured I could get by with using vacuum tubes. Then I found Bruce, a contractor with New England Solar Hot Water, who, like his company’s name suggests, only does solar hot water installations. Bruce and his crew had been doing vacuum tube installs for years and were stoked to hear I’d actually toured some of the factories where they get their parts.
In mid June they installed the collectors shown on the right that heat all of our domestic hot water; the water we use for showers, laundry, and in our sinks. The system is backed up by natural gas but on a sunny day like today, its unlikely we’ll need it. At 9am, with an outside temp of 43 F, our tubes are already a toasty 95 F and climbing.
The counter culture revolution germinated the civil rights and the peace movements, but also inspired the first Whole Earth Catalog (1968) that offered ways to live an environmentally conscious life. In its latest publication, the Whole Green Catalog, provides a wide range of products and living green tips for the eco-conscious or curious. The Whole Green Catalog is chock full of the usual green resources on housing, transportation, cleaning products, and healthy eating but also delves into greening your art and the latest in eco-technology. The catalog is published by Rodale, an eco-publishers that believes in “healthy living on a healthy planet”.
This is an excellent resource to have at home for easy reference, but I also recommend checking out some online resources to green living:
Yesterday’s New York Times carried an article about appliance maker Whirlpool, who was the recipient of a $20 million grant from the Federal Government to fund product development in the rapidly developing field of smart appliances.
These devices, once connected to a Smart Grid-enabled electricity supply, will be able to receive information from the grid and cycle down their power demands during times of peak energy use (and higher costs per kWh). At the moment, they are anticipating savings of $40 per year for a standard size dryer.
As always, your mileage may vary.
Next in the Smart Grid appliance pipeline, General Electric Co. will soon roll out its first commercial smart appliance, a hybrid electric heat pump water heater. The company said the pump will save consumers $250 a year in energy costs.
Other “demand response” appliances expected within the next year are refrigerators able to delay defrost cycles and dishwashers that delay operation until energy demands and costs decline at night.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission estimates smart grid-enhanced home appliances could shave up to 7 percent off U.S. peak demand through 2019. When this is added to the 15% reduction in demand that Smart Grid monitoring devices have been able to achieve in field testing, we have within our grasp the ability to reduce electricity consumption by 20% without making any structural changes within our homes.
Here’s an interesting graphic showing the amount of energy consumed by some common appliances when not in use, although the distinction between “passive” and “active” loads also seems unnecessary and distracting. Also, this phenomenon is typically called phantom load not “vampire load,” as the artist has dubbed it, after a less common term for wall-warts. Perhaps this even inspired google’s little contribution towards energy frugality last Halloween: The Haunted House? In any event, be sure to multiply the listed costs of these little suckers by a factor of 2 or 3 to to more accurately reflect bills in Cambridge.
Also while surfing this weekend I came across another infographic from progressive magazine GOOD. This one’s a sort of decision tree, comparing water consumption for daily activities. Keep in mind though, that things are not quite as simple as some would like to make them out to be. While it may actually take more water to grow an apple, the devil is in the details. If you’re biting into a Jonagold from Stow in September, then much of the water was rain, and very little gasoline went into transporting it. On the other hand, an orange from a field irrigated with scarce water in California or Florida has a lot of embodied energy. As always caveat emptor.
Just check out the latest YouTube videos calling for the greening of our lifestyle and reducing energy loss in our homes. Obama Girl made her fame with her audacious “Crush on Obama” video. In her most recent release “Save Your Energy”, Amber Lee Ettinger, dumps Russel Simmons from America’s Greenest Campus for her new energy efficient beau.
In another green video, a group of students also showcase their love for sustainable solutions with their Double Panes video for an environmental films project out of Stanford University: www.grassfedfilms.org. Check out how they promote Efficiency First with their play on Paper Planes by MIA:
We all shop and live in a capitalistic society. That being said, more so than ever consumers are given the option to buy “green”, but what does that really mean? Cage free eggs do not necessarily mean chickens roam wild on hundreds of acres, but instead have an inch or so more room to move in their pen. And “organic”? How are we really sure what we buy is truly organic? Is a USDA “organic” label enough? For the conscientious consumer, all of these questions plague our minds but there is hope in the form of Good Guide: http://www.goodguide.com/. This ever-updated database is a wealth of information for people looking to make the greenest bang for their buck. The ratings are based on health, environmental and social performance http://www.goodguide.com/about/ratings.
Take a look for yourself today and begin to shop smarter and greener!
When you visit the New York times website on Sunday evening, the list of most emailed articles is usually topped by either the big news story of the day, a particularly relevant Frank Rich article or some pithy commentary from Maureen Dowd. This past Sunday it was a 4,000 word article on noted academic Freeman Dyson, who has been comfortably employed as a big brain for over 50 years at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey.
Why the sudden interest in a man now is his mid 80s?
Dyson has always been considered a contrarian. As one of his colleagues observed, “… when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip away at the ice.”
While Dysons’s latest idea is not quite as ‘out there’ as his contributions to the shuttered ‘Orion’ project (inter-galatic space travel powered by controlled nuclear bomb blasts) his latest opinion–that we might all be overreacting to global warming–has certainly captured the attention of the scientific community and the media.
Several years ago, Dyson attracted attention with his rather curious statement that global warming could be easily dealt with by developing ‘carbon eating’ trees. This idea was based on Dyson’s observation of carbon levels at various times of the year. In temperate climates–such as Cambridge, MA–the level of carbon particles in the atmosphere are lowest in the fall. Assuming this coincides with the time of the year when trees and other vegetation are in full bloom and more equipped to extract carbon from the air, Dyson saw the possibility of geo-engineering a strain of trees that would perform this task more efficiently.
Recently, Dyson has been given to publicly wondering if global warming is all that bad and accusing Al Gore of being a ‘panic merchant’. The basis of his theory is our development from an agrarian economy to an post-industrial information-based society was powered by carbon-based energy, so how bad could it possibly be?
Warm Home Cool Planet finds it strange that a man of science is taking this position. Our progress as a civilization depends on our ability to develop and adapt new forms of technology that make our lives more convenient, more productive and safer. We discard old ways of doing things when something better comes along. How many people are sticking with a typewriter just because Hemingway wrote on one?
Carbon-based energy has been with us since the invention of the steam train. It is still relatively available and inexpensive–for now. We can already see a point where they will be neither. For the sake of our planet and future generations, it’s time our alternative sources of energy become our major sources of supply.
Do you remember Bill Nye the Science Guy? This summer cable nework Planet Green launched a new series called “Stuff Happens,” in which Mr. Nye investigates the environmental impact of common products and practices with his typical light-hearted flair. If you have Comcast, check it out on channel 233. Even if you don’t get Planet Green, it should be available via On Demand under News & World > Planet Green > Bill Nye.
From Canada comes the rather amazing story of Cansolair, a company that reuses soda cans to make solar panels. Once installed, this soda/solar unit can provide up to 30% of the heating for your house. All this in the cloudy, foggy Labrador region. All without adding another CO2 particle to the environment. Maybe Coke knew it was onto something when they introduced this new flavor last year.
The counter culture revolution germinated the civil rights and the peace movements, but also inspired the first 
Yesterday’s New York Times carried 
Why the sudden interest in a man now is his mid 80s?
Do you remember Bill Nye the Science Guy? This summer cable nework 