I heard of Rodale’s Plastic-Free Challenge on the blog My Plastic Free Life.

Like Zero Waste, Plastic-Free is an aspiration, not a reality. For example, I posted something on Facebook about the plastic-free challenge this morning while wearing my plastic retainers. Am I going to give up my retainers and let my teeth go crooked again after spending thousands of dollars on them? No.

Plastic-Free Challenge Rules

1. Don’t acquire more plastic (and that includes packaging).

2. Don’t cook food in plastic or store food in plastic. (The first one seems pretty easy, unless Teflon contains plastic—all you have to do is remember to take your food now stored in plastic and microwave it on a plate or in a china bowl. The second is a little more difficult, but you can store your food in Pyrex and cover it with foil. I have Pyrex microwave-safe storage dishes with plastic lids. I’m going to use those because they are cool!)

3. Minimize other plastic use. (So what, I’m not supposed to type on my laptop?)

You see the problem here. Plastic is so pervasive in our lives that the best we can do right now is pay attention to how much plastic we use and start to remove it from our lives.

Beth’s Tips for Minimizing Plastic in Your Life and in Your Food

1. Consider whether buying frozen vegetables in plastic bags (a few brands come in paper bags, but they may be lined with plastic) is better than buying canned veggies. The cans are lined with plastic, and that lining will leach chemicals into the veggies. It’s possible that plastic bags can leach chemicals into the frozen veggies, but it seems less likely to me.

2. Buy condiments in glass jars.

3. Buy cosmetics in glass jars. Yes, I know they’re hard to find, but there are a few. Also, try buy Aveda’s makeup brushes. For a while there, they were selling some with handles made of renewable materials. Aveda also used to sell metal eyeshadow and blush containers made from recycled metal.

4. If you need to buy something plastic (say, a spray bottle), ask if the store sells any made of recycled plastic. These goods are a lot more common than they used to be.

5. If the item you need comes in plastic, buy it in bulk (less packaging).

6. Buy items based on their packaging. For example, do those socks you want to buy hang from a plastic hanger or a cardboard hanger?

This is a bit off-topic for this blog, but I thought readers might want to hear about houses that reduce energy consumption by 90 percent. According to Studio 804, which built a passive house in Kansas City,

The heating load is drastically reduced by means of a super-insulated, virtually airtight building shell, broad Southern exposure and an energy recovery ventilator that provides constant fresh air and even distribution of heat.

The house is being sold for about $180,000, which puts it out of reach of the poorer residents of Kansas City. They are the people who need these homes the most. We need some kind of partnership, a la Habitat for Humanity, that pairs rich people willing to pay for these homes with poor people who need a more efficient home.

For more articles about passive homes, go to a blog called Jetson Green, which has published quite a few articles on passive houses in the United States. There are links to those articles at the end of the post on the KC house.

While reading back issues of Sustainable Industries, I came across an article titled “Land of the Free? Permitting Woes Create Longer Timelines and Bigger Headaches for Renewable Energy Developers” by Sara Stroud (October 2009). By “woes,” the author meant the difficult process of finding enough land to build a large solar or wind installation within the timeline set by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and other laws and regulations. Another problem is local and state government ignorance of how to establish a renewable energy facility. Wind turbine and solar farms have been popping up all over, but plenty of local and state governments have never gone through the process of setting one up.

The article made me wonder if installation of small wind turbines in yards and neighborhoods could help Americans meet renewable energy goals, so I searched online for “small-scale wind energy development” and found an FAQ published by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). I learned a few things, including the fact that a turbine’s blades need to sit 30 feet above anything within a 500-foot circle. So that means 30 feet above the top of a tree or building. And I learned that despite the prohibitive cost of a small turbine (as much as $70,000, before rebates, to power most of the energy needs of the average American home using 800 kilowatt-hours per month), wind energy is cheaper than solar (at least, according to the AWEA).

If you scroll down that page, you’ll find a Wisconsin Focus on Energy Fact Sheet on rooftop turbines. Near the end of the document, you’ll find a link to a PDF of Small Wind Turbine Success Stories. The typical wind turbine pays for itself in 6 to 15 years and lasts about 30 years. Wind turbines tend to raise property values, not decrease them.

It all sounds like a great argument for DIY wind energy, but the main point I plucked from my reading was that energy conservation is always cheaper than energy production. So if you are thinking of installing renewable energy on your property, get an energy audit first and reduce the kilowatts you use. It will be a lot more affordable to install solar and wind to provide 500 Kwh/month than to provide 800 Kwh/month.

I wonder if there is a way to install turbines on city rooftops, that is, to build a “wind roof” instead of a “green roof.”

How Is This Restoration?

It’s not restoration; it’s one of the methods Americans can use to reduce the need for restoration. The more we reduce our energy use, the less coal we need to extract from our lands (or someone else’s lands) to run our power plants. Installing renewable energy on top of that will reduce the need to extract fuel even more. If the coal remains in the ground, then chances are the land on top of it will remain in a more natural state.

One problem I do have with large-scale installations is their effect on ground-nesting birds. Wind farms have been shown to drive away grassland birds, one of the most threatened groups of birds in the United States.

To answer the question above differently, I could say that small-scale renewable energy installation is a return to the American value of self-sufficiency. If many Americans installed panels or turbines on their properties, we would be less subject to utility rate hikes and to attacks on power plants.

I just got a cool new catalog from Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI), which has several stores in the Denver Metro area. I found things I liked in it, such as the Vibram Five-Fingers Multisport Shoes. I’ve been thinking of trying to jog in them.

But I was put off by some of the camping gear. You can find everything for camping in this catalog except a modular house. There are easy-ups and pads and mattresses and rather ridiculous camping stoves. Whatever happened to roughing it? To adapting to nature? God forbid we get a sunburn or not have a gourmet meal for one weekend!

Plus just about everything in that store is imported. US jobs, REI?

Then I think, “I’m a grump.” That’s what the consumer society does to people like me who like nice things but don’t think we all need 2 houses and fabulously comfortable camping gear and our own yards and our own lawnmower and on and on and on. I just sound grumpy.

It makes me mad.

Gentle reader, you may have been scratching your head over that headline.

I mean that water is becoming as hot a topic as green energy and oil spills and energy use and all that stuff. And I say “becoming” for one simple reason: in the United States, most of us don’t have to worry about our water supply. It comes out of a tap. That’s it.

Unless you live on an Indian reservation. A few years ago I went regularly to the Navajo reservation, and I’ll never forget the kitchen of the tract home with its sink and the holes where a faucet and sprayer would go. Too bad no water lines had been laid to that house. Too bad they had to hoist a big plastic jug into the back of their truck, fill it with water somewhere, haul it home, and then get it into smaller containers by means of a plastic hose and their mouths.

Or unless you live in the developing world and don’t have easy access to water, let alone clean water.

In most of the world, water is already as important an issue as energy.

To illustrate the extent of water privilege in this country, I’ll describe my own water use: in a low-use month, my husband and I consume about 3,000 gallons of water. That’s in the winter, when we’re using water for taking showers, flushing toilets, cleaning the house and washing dishes, watering a few houseplants, and washing clothes. There have been a few months when we got it down to 2,000 gallons. And that 2,000–3,000 gallons per month is lower than it could be because I don’t flush the toilet every time I use it; I have shower heads with a metal bar I can flip up, reducing the flow to a drip while I wash my hair; and I have a fairly efficient dishwasher. If I weren’t doing all those things, my husband and I would probably use 6,000 gallons per month.

So, by practicing basic water conservation that doesn’t cost much, I have cut our water use in half, but we still use 36,000 gallons per year, or 18,000 gallons per person. And in the summer, when I’m watering the lawn and the xeriscape, our water use can go up to 15,000 gallons per month (that’s on the high end).

I still can’t believe I use 18,000 gallons of water per year, or more. That’s about 50 gallons per day. Just for me.

There are more expensive ways to reduce water use: collect water in rain barrels; install a gray-water system that recycles water from the kitchen and shower; buy new toilets that use less than 1.6 gallons per flush; buy more water-efficient appliances.

Even more expensive: do a real xeriscape on the yard, instead of the partial xeriscape I have. Or redesign neighborhoods so they have common areas that can be planted with native grasses and such.

The biggest water user in this country: agriculture. I wonder how much it would cost to give every farmer an efficient irrigation system.

As you can see, the United States has a lot of work to do to become a country that uses water efficiently.

Inspiration for this article came from “The Worth of Water” by Benjamin H. Grumbles, Water and Wastes Digest, July 2010. Grumbles is the director of the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality and notes that Arizona governor Brewer is developing a statewide plan for water sustainability. Whatever you think of her policies on immigration, you have to give her kudos for water policy.

I often ask myself why Americans don’t recycle more. I’ve lived in my current home for 14 years and the same percentage of my neighbors recycle: about 30%, or 2 of the 6 families on the cul-de-sac. At times I have made efforts to get them to recycle more, but neither the efforts nor the recycling lasted.

I’ve been tempted lately to have a cul-de-sac event and have all of us bring out our trash and sort it into piles of recyclables and un-recyclables. But I can’t bring myself to broach the subject. I’m afraid—that my neighbors will think I’m a pest, that nobody will want to do it, that I’ll feel slighted. I wish I were better at getting groups to do things. My husband is good at that, so perhaps I should recruit him. Perhaps he could teach me.

Somehow I developed an exaggerated sense that I should not bother people, that I should not impose my own views on them. Yet people do that all the time. It’s called “getting to know someone.” I wish I could find a pleasant way to talk to people about my recycling obsession in person, but for now I’m doing so on my website.

The only way Americans will get to Zero Waste is if they are forced by the government. I wish it weren’t so; I wish there was a business solution. But with landfill fees at only $12/ton in Colorado, recycling doesn’t stand a chance. The state of Colorado could encourage recycling by raising landfill fees, but I have a feeling there’s a pretty effective lobby against that.

Here’s a link to a Boulder nonprofit that’s going for zero waste. This particular page features the Center for Hard to Recycle Materials (CHARM).

I realized that to get to an economy that restores, the United States requires companies that restore. And I went  looking for such companies.

An interview in Sustainable Industries magazine led me to Interface, a company that makes modular carpet, or carpet tiles. In the mid-1990s its CEO, Ray Anderson, decided to eliminate the company’s negative environmental impacts by 2020.

The section on Sustainability in Action on Interface’s website has loads of information. One tidbit I liked: Interface products will be accompanied by Environmental Product Declarations, which are similar to the nutrition labeling provided for packaged food at the grocery store: “an EPD shows the ingredients of products and the associated environmental impacts.”

Another favorite section from the website: Closing the Loop, about Interface carpets made from recycled carpet fiber.

Through a process called ReEntry^® 2.0, clean, post-consumer Nylon 6,6 fiber is returned to Interface’s fiber supplier where it, in combination with some virgin materials, is recycled into new Nylon 6,6 for use in new carpet fiber.  At the same time, the post-consumer vinyl carpet backing is recycled into new backing using Interface’s Cool Blue™ backing technology. Plastics that cannot be used for Interface processes or products are distributed to other industry suppliers for re-use in their material streams.

I’m passionate about recycling, and I absolutely love it when companies find ways to reuse the very materials they are selling.

So is Interface a restoration company? In the interview in Sustainable Industries (July 2009), Anderson talks of Interface being a restorative company. All its efforts toward sustainability are wonderful, and its actions may have prevented some development for extractive purposes, but I don’t think it is doing restoration in the sense I envision it.

That being said, I wish every company in the United States would adopt Interface’s model.

Just found what seems to be an enduring link to an August 2009 article from Science magazine: “Leaping the Efficiency Gap.” It is hopeful about energy efficiency, yet it captures the debate about whether efficiency in the United States can be achieved without pain. Most people these days seem to think some pain will be required, but they also think the potential is huge:

David Goldstein, who studied with [California efficiency expert Arthur] Rosenfeld and now co-directs work on energy policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), says California’s experience proves that carbon emissions can be contained and even reduced at minimal cost. “The most important lesson is: Success is possible, and a fairly limited set of policies gets you most of the way there,” Goldstein says. And, he adds, it’s not hard to go even further with energy saving: “The practical limits [of increased efficiency] have never been tested.”

The practical limits have never been tested.

How many times have I been exasperated by the wasteful habits of Americans? Just think how much we could accomplish if we just reduced the obvious inefficiencies. I bet if you thought about work and home and your neighborhood, you could identify 5 inefficiencies without even thinking. Mine would be (1) windows in my house that have lost their seal, (2) our old Dodge Dakota truck that somehow didn’t qualify for “cash for clunkers,” (3) my neighbors who don’t recycle, (4) Starbucks’ refusal to use 100% recycled paper coffee cups and compostable plastic glasses, and (5) all the windows that are currently the fashion in restaurants.

One of the article’s strengths is its focus on human ecology, or, the reason people don’t make energy-efficient choices that seem to be logical. Efficiency programs these days are moving away from financial incentives toward social incentives, such as the World War II slogan, “When you drive alone, you drive with Hitler.”

Or social incentives like these:

Every once in a while, however, circumstances force people to focus on energy. When they do, the results can be astonishing. In April 2008, an avalanche cut a transmission line that supplied Juneau, Alaska, with cheap hydropower. The city switched over to diesel generators, but the electricity they produced cost five times as much. City officials went looking for help and contacted Alan Meier, an LBNL conservation expert. “In a crisis, you can talk about behavior,” says Meier. The city spread the word that “good citizens save electricity [emphasis mine].” And they did, lowering thermostats, turning off lights, and unplugging electronic equipment. Over 6 weeks, Juneau’s electricity consumption fell by 40%, yet Juneau’s economy did not falter. The transmission line was repaired within 3 months; electricity use rebounded, but it remains about 6% below its preavalanche level. A similar phenomenon, but on a much larger scale, happened during a 2001 energy crisis in Brazil. The country “cut its power consumption by 20% in 6 weeks. That shows you how much behavior can get you,” Meier says.

Go read the article. It’s fun and has a lot of good information.

From Organic Lifestyle magazine, I learned about Oceana, a nonprofit that since the early 2000s has been focusing on protecting the world’s oceans. Here’s some information from the article that struck me:

Commercial fishing creates enormous waste. Sixteen billion pounds of by-catch fish are wasted each year and hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, marine mammals, and seabirds are killed. U.S. commercial fishing operations alone throw away more than one million metric tons of fish each year, nearly a third of its annual commercial catch.

And that’s just one quote, a perfect example of how conservation is essential to restoration, or, rather, is essential to reducing the need for restoration. Go read what the article has to say about the shipping industry’s carbon emissions and what Oceana has been doing for the last several years.

From United magazine (February 2010):

The village of Kamikatsu (2,000 residents), on the island of Shikoku in southwestern Japan, sorts waste into 34 categories, more than the 3 categories of burnable, nonburnable, and recyclable used elsewhere in Japan. By 2020, the villagers believe they will have eliminated the need to burn any waste and will have reached their goal of zero waste.

The Zero Waste Academy, where trash is separated, lies on the edge of town.

San Francisco, by contrast, diverts about 80% of its trash. That’s good for such a large city. But I don’t believe it will get all the way to zero in the next ten years.