As part of my waste reduction challenge I am trying to re-use more things here at home before recycling them. I’ve already been using the back side of pages that I had printed and didn’t turn out right as note-paper, however I rarely print, (who prints these days?), so I ran out. Since then I have started re-using the blank parts of the junk mail that shows up in my mailbox – I just cut the usable parts out and recycle the rest. It’s amazing how many items have good-sized blank areas, for example, most envelopes have at least the back blank, and may have the entire inside blank as well.
In August I wrote about my Electricity Eco-Challenge here at the house. The goal was to reduce our power consumption as much as possible, without having to always live in the dark or anything. I now have an update almost a year later, and after the initial success the electrical savings have kept rolling in, (or not rolling in, depending on your point of view). Hydro-Quebec has a nice chart of my electrical use on their website:
As you may be able to see from the chart, (click it if you want a bigger version), for 6 months of the year we have reduced our use by 200kWh per month! At current rates, we saved $64.80 in the past year on our power bill. However, in real life we saved more, because by reducing our power consumption we kept our use below the threshold where the price of power increases.
We are now looking for ways to reduce our use even more. I have set up the office so I can shut off almost all of the phantom loads in it by flipping an easily-accessible powerbar switch. We’re also trying to hang dry as much of our laundry as possible. I’ll post again in a few months with results.
When I wrote recently about the carbon credit industry I tried to make the distinction between good bad carbon credits. Today wired.com has a story about an Australian company that is planning on dumping urea into the ocean. This urea, (which is very high in nitrogen), is supposed to feed algae & plankton in the area, which in turn will use carbon dioxide from the air. When this algae & plankton dies, so the theory goes, it will sink to the bottom of the ocean, taking the carbon with it.
A plan like this screams for regulation. Does dumping nitrogen into the ocean really sound like a good idea? We’ve been told for years not to use soap or fertilizers with too much nitrogen in it because it unbalances the ecosystem of the bodies of water where the runoff ends up.
Not only does this plan pollute in ways that we’ve been trying to avoid for years, but it is also next to impossible to measure how much carbon will be sequestered, (if any), by this project.
That’s about all I have to say, read the article yourself and form your own opinions.
On Monday I wrote about Carbon Credits and was fairly negative about the way the industry is currently set up. Well, I just read an article on Wired.com that gives me hope.
Pop!Tech and Ebay have teamed up to create the Pop!Tech Carbon Initiative. They started selling carbon credits today and will continue to do so through the end of the year. The thing that sets the Pop!Tech Carbon Initiative apart from other carbon offset vendors is that you can actually choose the project that your offset will contribute to. There are three projects. You pick one and buy the offset and your money goes to that project.
Personally, I would like to see the projects certified as Gold Standard, or something similar, (they’re not at the moment), however since I can choose which project my credits support I can support the project that I believe is best, (for example one of the projects involves reforestation — I would likely choose another project).
Finally, this quote from the Pop!Tech Carbon Offset Initiative website that really drives home the concept of additionality in carbon offset projects:
It is essential that the activity you are supporting would not otherwise have happened. So if someone is installing a solar hot water system on their roof, for instance, which will reduce the amount of gas they burn to heat water, and you offer to pay for half of it, that is not a valid carbon offset.
