Greenvenience

I'm typically not a jargon or buzzword guy. Matter of fact, I typically go out of my way to not use them at all. But something about this word I really like.

Greenvenience.

It perfectly describes the parameters people put on their willingness to act in a "green" manner.

Recycling has become, at least in larger cities, incredibly convenient. Here in Denver we have big purple trash cans on wheels. We put all our recyclables in that big, wheel it out to the curb with the trash every other week, and the city picks it up. No sorting whatsoever. Due to the incredibly high level of greenvenience, recycling has gone up 40% in our city since they initiated the big purple bins.

For the majority of Americans, that's the level of greenvenience they need to make it worth their while. The more involved I have to get, the more it's going to slow me down, the less likely I am to do it.

So how about you? What's your greenvenient threshhold?

Are you like Asbestos Dust, who dumps the old motor oil from his 1972 Ford 3/4-ton into the wetlands behind his house? Or are you like Venessa, who uses Aster leaves for toilet paper?

Do you use paper towels, or do you clean with sponges and rags?

Do you recycle every single thing you can, including all forms of paper, or do you sometimes throw things in the trash because it's just easier?

Do you buy milk and juice and other beverages in recyclable containers only, or do you buy them in non-recyclable wax-coated paper cartons, maybe because of price or maybe because of brand preference?

Do you carpool?

Do you drive to lunch?

Do you use compact fluorescent bulbs at home, or do you prefer regular bulbs because you don't like the color that comes from compact fluorescent?

Do you make sure bottles and cans always get put in recycling, or do you toss them in the trash if that's what's closest and easiest?

What else?

In the spirit of full disclosure, I've done every single one of the "non-green" things listed above. Well, except the oil thing.

I had a 1984 Ford Bronco.

All Your Bottles Are Belong to Earth

Are you a bottled water drinker? Some food for thought:

• The picture above, found at whatisleft.org and created by David Coale of Acterra, is a representation of the amount of oil required to ship a bottle of water from its source to the Bay Area of California.


• Roughly 1.5 million tons of plastic are expended in the bottling of 89 billion liters of water each year.*


• The United States is the world’s leading consumer of bottled water, with Americans drinking 26 billion liters in 2004, or approximately one 8-ounce glass per person every day.** This in spite of the fact that the U.S. has some of the world's safest tap water.


• The most commonly used plastic for making water bottles is polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is derived from crude oil. Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year. Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year.**


• According to the Container Recycling Institute, 86 percent of plastic water bottles used in the United States become garbage or litter. Incinerating used bottles produces toxic byproducts such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals. Buried water bottles can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade. Almost 40 percent of the PET bottles that were deposited for recycling in the United States in 2004 were actually exported, sometimes to as far away as China—adding to the resources used by this product.**


• We're moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That's a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 81/3 pounds a gallon. It's so heavy you can't fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water--you have to leave empty space.)***


• In Fiji, a state-of-the-art factory spins out more than a million bottles a day of the hippest bottled water on the U.S. market today, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have safe, reliable drinking water.***


• Bottled water is much less regulated than tap water. As a matter of fact, most bottled water is tap water. Some has been filtered for purity, some has simply had minerals added for taste, and others are straight from the tap.


• Bottled water companies are not required to reveal their filtration and/or purification processes on the label. So you simply don't know what's in that water. And just because it says "Spring Water" doesn't mean it's clean spring water.


• Ounce for ounce, bottled water costs more than gasoline. Depending on the brand, it costs 250 to 10,000 times more than tap water.****


• If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, which costs about $1.35, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with tap water before that water would cost $1.35.***

About eight months ago we put faucet-mounted filtration systems in our kitchen, and upstairs near the bedrooms. The systems cost about $30 each. We replace the filters, which cost about $10 each, every two to three months downstairs and every three to four months upstairs.

We've saved a shitload of money. We now have filtered water for everything we consume -- not just drinking, but cooking too. We're not lugging cased of bottled water from the store anymore. Our house isn't cluttered with plastic bottled anymore. And we're no longer contributing to all the waste and pollution caused by the bottles.


*According to a 2001 report of the World Wide Fund for Nature.
**From the article "Bottled Water: Pouring Resources Down the Drain," published by the Earth Policy Institute.
***From the Fast Company article "Message in a Bottle".
****From the NYT article "Bad to the Last Drop," by Tom Standage.

Whether Al Gore's full of an undetermined amount of shit or not...

Who cares?

Here's a newsflash to all the "Global warming is a myth!" people:

Pollution is bad. Bad for you, bad for me, bad for everyone, bad for everything.

The crap that gets into the air -- crap that we put up there -- hangs out for us to breathe, contribuiting to all kinds of respiratory problems. It also comes back down again when it rains or snows, polluting the earth and the water. That affects what we drink and what we eat.

So when Al Gore's PowerPoint presentation on global warming wins an Oscar, the artist in me thinks, "You've got to be kidding me! Did you not see The U.S. vs. John Lennon? The horror!" But the human being in me, the one concerned with a trivial thing I like to call "health," thinks, "If this compels some people to rethink some of their behaviors regarding waste and environmental impact, where's the bad in that?"

Seriously, where's the bad in that? If you don't believe in Al Gore's theory of global warming, fine. Step back from that higher concept for a minute and bring it down to us here on the earth today. Tell me what harm would come from us putting fewer pollutants into the air, water and earth. At the very least, it will make for a healthier life, which benefits everyone, even capitalists. And maybe, just maybe, if there is something to this whole global warming thing, it might help reduce or even reverse that.

That just doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.

EnvironMental, Part Deux

Okay, guess I gotta react, regroup and rephrase here. I think many of you who commented on my last post didn't get the full gist of what I was trying to say. One could suppose that, since a number of you didn't get the gist, the gist may not have been spelled out clearly enough. I, however, prefer to blame all of you. That said, let me boil this down.

In no way was I trying to say I don't believe we should be doing what we can to protect the earth, be it for our health today or the health of her inhabitants in the future.

The point I was trying to make was that if you want the largest number of people to care about it, put it in terms of how it will affect them, right now.

I can't speak for citizens of other countries, but here in America we are an instant-gratification society. What decisions can I make that will benefit me right now? We buy with money we don't have, and we don't save the money we do have. We have an "I'll deal with that later" mentality. Global warming? By the time it's really a threat, scientists will have figured out a way to stop it.

But today, right now, the air your kids are breathing is giving them asthma. Right now. The water they're drinking is polluting their bodies. Right now.

That's immediate. And perhaps that will motivate people in a way "the future" will not.

I'm not saying this is some magic wand that we wave and voila, no one will want to pollute anymore! And I'm not talking about whether or not people should care about what we're doing to the earth.

I'm just talking about a different means of motivating people to care about what we're doing the earth. Same flipping goal, just a different way of getting there.

That is all.

READ HALOSCAN COMMENTS.

EnvironMental

A recent post over at Mark's, which was related to a recent post over at Archer's, got me thinking about global warming and other issues related to the environment.

With the amount of scientists who state that global warming is a reality, I tend to believe that global warming is a reality. Yeah, I know lots of big businesses and rabid righties have found scientists who say global warming's all a bunch of left-wing bullshit, but the smoking industry also had doctors who claimed smoking isn't bad for you.

The problem, however, is that global warming is future tense. It's talked about in terms of "saving the planet for future generations." Yes, there are people who try to tie current weather patterns and systems to global warming, but it's not like we're suddenly skipping winter and sweating to death in February. Well, those of us who live in places that actually have four seasons. For the most part, we go about our lives dealing with the annoying unpredictability of the weather. Just as we have for a long, long freaking time.

So as much as it might be a reality that our polluting actions -- as individuals, as businesses and as governments -- are indeed having an adverse affect on our atmosphere, it's not tangible enough for us to really care. And yet, that's been the major focus of environmentalists -- try to get us as a society to stop polluting in order to slow global warming.

It seems to me that the much more effective tactic would be to try to get us as a society to stop polluting in order to keep us from getting cancer right the hell now. That's what they used to do, before global warming catapulted to the top of the landfill. They used to talk about pollution as it affected us today. The immediate and irrefutable impact of pollution on our health, the health of our children, the health of our parents, and the health of everyone on the planet.

When you breathe polluted air, it's going to be bad for you. When you drink polluted water, it's going to be bad for you. When you eat polluted food, it's going to be bad for you.

That's the reason for us to care. That's the reason for us to protect our air, water and land. Because it's hurting us right now.

I absolutely care about future generations. But my concept of future generation is firmly rooted in the three children I see and touch and love every day. It's with my nieces and nephews, and my cousins' kids. That future generation is alive, right now.

And I'd really like for all of us to not be breathing, drinking and eating shit.

READ HALOSCAN COMMENTS.