Everyday Life

There are many opportunities in our everyday lives to reduce environmental harm while, in many cases, saving money. Suggestions follow.

Electricity

Remember how your parents told you to turn out the lights when you left a room? They were right, and now you are paying the bill for wasted electricity. Generating that electricity comes with an environmental price (remember those decapitated mountains in West Virginia?). Use it if you need it, but don't waste it.

• Shut down your computer at night. Computers consume significant amounts of power, and shutting them down and rebooting them the next is harmless to the computer and saves energy and money.

• When the temperature is hot outside, do you really need to turn your house or car into a refrigerator? Use air conditioning moderately to cool your room or your house or your car to the highest temperature at which you comfortable and no lower. Air conditioning consumes a lot of power, and thus has a big environmental price. Use it, but don't waste it.

Throwing it away

Trash disposal has become a huge problem. We are generate a lot more of it per capita than our grandparents did, and there are more of us. The increase per capita is a direct result of our desire for ``convenience'', which we frequently pursue without regard to the environmental consequences. This leads to ``use it once, throw it away'' products and to excessive packaging. Reversing this trend centers on a simple idea: No use is better than re-use, which is better than recycling²⁶, which is better than throwing it away.²⁷

Here are a few specific suggestions. I hope you will find many more to incorporate in your own lives:

• When you go to the store to buy one or two items (few enough items to be easily carried), the person that checks you out will most often try to put those items, already packaged, in a bag. Just refuse the bag. You will take it home and immediately throw it away, or, at best, recycle it. This is pure waste.

• When you stop for coffee, try to have a mug with you (this is particularly easy if the coffee stop is a routine one and you arrive by car), rather than getting your coffee in a paper or styrofoam cup (or, worse yet, in the two paper cups that some vendors use for insulation), which you will throw away after one use.

• When you have lunch and receive a drink in a recyclable container, if it is reasonably possible to do so (e.g., you are traveling by car), take the container home with you to be recycled, rather than just throwing it away.

• When you are in a hotel, you are given soap, shampoo (in tiny containers, which I will discuss more below), etc. You use some small portion of it, and then you check out. What happens to the remainder? They throw it away. Waste! Many hotels now post environmental statements in their bathrooms in which they suggest reusing towels (by all means do so) and also invite you to take home partially used open containers and soap. Do it. Take them home, use them, and recycle the containers. By doing so, it's the old refrain: you help the environment and save yourself a bit of money.

• Let's talk about packaging. Suppose we are at the store, about to buy a fizzy drink. We have a number of choices of container size. Does this matter to the environment? Let's do a little analysis. I need to take you back to high-school again. To make things simpler, let's assume that the packages we are choosing from are all spheres. The formula for the volume of a sphere is:
  
  $$V = \frac{4}{3} \pi R^{3}$$
  
  
  whereas the formula for the surface area of a sphere is:
  
  $$A = 4 \pi R^{2}$$
  
  

  Why am I subjecting you to this, you ask? What I want you to notice is that the volume of a sphere, the amount of fizzy stuff the spherical container can hold, grows as the third power, or cube, of its radius R. I also ask you to note that the surface area, which is the amount of waste you will generate when you dispose of the container after drinking the contents, grows as the second power, or square of its radius R. Why do we care about this? Here's why: if you double the radius of the container, it will hold 8 times ($2^{3}=8$) as much liquid, but the surface area will only be 4 times ($2^{2}=4$) larger. This is an environmental bargain! By doubling the size (measured by the radius) of the package, we can hold 8 times as much stuff with only 4 times as much packaging material to buy²⁸ and to dispose of. Tripling the size is even better: you get 27 times the volume ($3^{3}=27$) with 9 times ($3^{2}=9$) as much packaging. The bigger the package, the better this gets.²⁹

  But most packages aren't spheres, you complain. Ah, but this analysis generalizes to packages of any shape, though the math gets a little harder, and so we won't do it; just accept my word for it. What you should take away from this exercise is that you should always buy the largest package that you can, consistent with storage and spoilage constraints. And this is why the little shampoo bottles in hotel rooms are such a bad thing - a lot of waste for very little product delivered.

• What do you do with food waste? Throw it away? Consider composting, and let Mother Nature recycle it. It's fun, easy, and produces wonderful fertilizer for your garden³⁰.

• How do you get your news? A newspaper? This is the ultimate ``use it once, throw it away'' environmental problem. We live in the Internet Age. Most of us have reasonably fast (at least 56kb/s, and more with increasing availability) Internet connections and nice, light laptops. Almost every newspaper worthy of mention is available on the World Wide Web, most of them for free. The New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Time, Newsweek, The Economist, etc. are all available on-line. Have you ever thought about eliminating the daily pile of newspaper waste that, at best, gets recycled? Either read the newspaper while on line (a wireless network inside your house is not terribly expensive and allows you to do this reading with your laptop while in the comfort of your favorite chair), or download the stories you care about, save them to the disk in your laptop, and read them later, perhaps on the train. Nicholas Negroponte, the famed visionary leader of the MIT Media Lab, predicted more than 25 years ago that we would soon receive our news this way (with the addition of a robotic agent that would scan the news for us, retrieving those articles it had learned that we were likely to be interested in; we're not quite there yet in this regard, but it's close). Consider taking advantage of our fabulous technology to change old habits, save yourself some money, and help the environment. I read the NY Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and The Economist on line (no, not all of them every day!) with a 128 kb connection to the Internet (which is almost a factor of 10 slower than the DSL or cable services that are now increasingly available, but not in the town where I live; nonetheless, it works just fine).

• Do you print things you find on the Web because you aren't sure how to save web pages to your disk for later display on the computer, or perhaps didn't know you could? Learn how to use the 'Save As' feature that Internet Explorer and Netscape provide (read the browser documentation or ask an IT person at your company for help if you are having trouble). It's easy, and it eliminates paper use. The same idea applies to email. I've seen people on trains carrying a laptop and a stack of paper on which they'd printed email messages (yes, I was snooping a bit). It's not difficult to learn to download emails to your laptop (or your Palm, for that matter) for reading and replying-to off-line, eliminating this wasteful use of paper.

• Shaving is another ``use it once, throw it away'' problem. Why is Gillette the huge company it is today? Because you occasionally buy one of their razors? To paraphrase James Carville, it's the blades, stupid (please don't be insulted; I am just quoting Carville's famous note to himself during Bill Clinton's first campaign for the Presidency). And the problem with the blades is that they are an integrated assembly made of metal and plastic (unlike 50 years ago when a razor blade for a Gillette ``Safety Razor'' was a sliver of metal), making them impossible to recycle. What to do?

  First, don't use disposable razors for everyday shaving, much as Gillette would love it if you did. They maximize the amount of waste, because you are not only throwing away the blade, you are throwing away the plastic handle as well, and it isn't recyclable. In fact, if a product has the word ``disposable'' in its name, think hard. Sure, they can come in handy in a pinch³¹, but should be avoided as a steady diet in most cases. Paper or plastic plates, plastic forks and spoons, etc. are another example of this: handy for an occasional picnic, but not environmentally friendly on a frequent basis.

  Back to the shaving problem. The big challenge is to help make Gillette (and Warren Buffett, a major stockholder) a little less rich by reducing or eliminating blade replacements. This is not easy, in my experience, but there are options. You can try an electric razor, which have improved over the years (I think the elimination of non-recyclable waste trumps the small amount of electricity consumed). There are also products available that will sharpen Gillette blades, extending their useful life. For the brave and skillful, there's the old-fashioned straight razor and leather strap (you really do need to know what you are doing here, lest you perform a one-person version of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd³², but they were in common use for many generations before the invention of the safety razor³³). For men, growing a beard helps, if you are so inclined. The less surface area to shave, the longer the blades last.

• Batteries are another problem, not only because you use them once and throw them away, but because they contain substances that need to be disposed of properly. There's a simple answer to this one: use rechargeable batteries. You may have had bad experiences in the past with NiCD batteries, which really weren't very good. The newer NiMH batteries, available in all the standard sizes, are much better. I use them in my digital camera, my Palm, flashlights, and anything else that takes standard batteries. One small issue: if you have an old NiCD charger, don't use it with NiMH batteries; the charging curves are different. NiMH chargers are readily available (e.g., Radio Shack). ³⁴ The savings in the cost of throw-away batteries by use of rechargeables will quickly compensate you for the cost of the charger, and thereafter will save you money (cost of electricity included).

• Spilled something in the kitchen? Don't reflexively reach for the paper towels. Wipe it up with a sponge, which is reusable; paper towels are not.

• We frequently receive things in the mail or in packages that can be reused. I'm referring to paper clips, rubber bands, and such. Like most people, I have a small container on my desk containing these kinds of supplies. Instead of discarding paper clips and rubber bands that appear this way, I drop them in my container instead. Same amount of work, and a little environmentally friendlier.

• Kitchen food bags can frequently be used more than once. Sometimes they are not even soiled, so why throw them out? Put them back in the drawer and reuse them. If a bit dirty, rinse them, shake them out, and let them dry on the counter (my wife has a little wooden dryer on the counter that she uses for this purpose).

Food

Almost 30 years ago, after doing some fairly extensive reading, I became a semi-vegetarian. I say ``semi'' because I do eat some fish. I've eaten no red meat in all that time, and almost no poultry. Why? Well, some of it had to do with what I learned in my reading about the inhumane treatment of food animals³⁵. There were health reasons as well. I think my decision to completely eliminate red meat has been proved correct over these many years, as more is learned about this. (And the proof is in the pudding, pun intended, since I'm now 60 and still alive and kicking). But most relevant to the subject of this paper, I learned at the time that the lower you eat on the food chain³⁶, the more efficiently you are able to obtain the nutrients you need. Eating grain directly requires fewer resources than feeding grain to a cow and then eating the cow.

Water

Let's now talk about water. I don't need to explain its importance to all of us. You are also probably aware of the drought conditions that have prevailed in much of the US in recent years (many scientists believe this is yet another side-effect of global warming). In any case, it is clear, or should be, that water is not to be wasted. Some ideas:

• When brushing your teeth, don't leave the water running. Wet your toothbrush, turn the water off, brush your teeth, turn the water on and rinse the toothbrush. Simple, and it saves a lot of water over a year, across all members of a family.
• When you turn on the shower, turn it fully to ``hot''. The hot water will come up fastest that way, minimizing waste of water.
• Try to find ways not to run water just to bring up the hot water. Combining water uses can help minimize this, by first doing something that can be done with water of any temperature and then doing the hot-water task. During the first task, open only the hot-water valve or turn the handle fully to ``hot''. You will thus make use of otherwise wasted water while bringing up the hot water for the second task. It's easy, it reduces water consumption and it saves you time (you're doing something useful, rather than waiting around for the hot water to come up).
• Toilets are big consumers of water, particularly the old 8-gallon types many of us still have in our houses. Consider replacing them with more modern, water-saving toilets (yes, some don't work well and some do; you need to do a little research here, because there are good products available; use Consumer Reports to find them). Another step you can take, which many do, is not to flush after every urination. Flush instead after every other urination. While some may find this offensive (if you do, think about the cost vs. the benefit; if it still bothers you, don't do it, but do consider a new water-saving toilet), it is perfectly safe and sanitary, and practiced by many environmentally conscious people.

Lawn and Garden

The trend toward ease and convenience has resulted in many of the tools we use to maintain our lawns and gardens acquiring gasoline engines during the last 50 years. Lawn mowers, edge trimmers, chain saws, and leaf blowers can all be obtained in gasoline-powered models, and commonly are. I'm sure it won't come as a surprise to you at this point that I think this is bad. These gasoline engines are extremely inefficient and dirty, producing disproportionate (compared to a modern automobile engine) quantities of smog emissions relative to their size. In some cases, the manufacturers employ two-stroke engines (the type where you mix oil with the gasoline) that are particularly dirty.

Combine their dirty exhausts with the fact that the owner/user is in close proximity to those exhausts, in perfect position to breath their poisons. Add a generous dose of noise, and you have a picture that doesn't make a lot of sense but is repeated millions of times across the US, contributing significantly to our energy use and air pollution problems. We even have the SUV of garden implements: the lawn tractor. People are buying these gigantic riding toys in many cases with as little functional justification as is used by the vast majority of SUV owners.

If you are among the thundering herd that has filled its tool sheds with gasoline-powered implements, I suggest you re-think this. If your yard and lawn is small, consider going back to manual tools. Walkways can be cleared with brooms; leaves can be raked; no noise, clean air. Small lawns can be mowed with push-mowers, still available in places like Sears. Modern push mowers are actually superior to those that were around when I was a child; they are lighter and seem to have better bearings. The result is that they are much easier to push. Both you and the environment will be healthier if you breathe the clean air and get the exercise afforded by mowing your lawn this way.

If your yard and lawn are sizable, then consider tools powered by electric motors. There are electric chain saws, leaf blowers, edgers/trimmers, and lawn mowers available. You have choices of battery-power, which requires recharging but eliminates extension cords, or corded models. We have a Sears electric lawn mower (as well as a Sears push mower) with a 100' heavy-duty extension cord³⁷. Once you learn the trick of dealing with the cord (the obvious: keep the cord between the mower and the outlet), the lawn gets mowed as quickly and closely as it would with a gasoline mower, except that you haven't been polluting the air and breathing the fumes while doing this task. You also haven't been wrestling with starting a recalcitrant engine, an experience we've all had with gasoline mowers.

Other than not breathing exhaust fumes, why are electric-powered tools better for the environment than their gasoline-powered equivalents. They both require use of some sort of fuel, you argue. Furthermore, aren't there losses in transmission of electric power? Good questions! There are two answers. One is our old friend, economies of scale. Because they serve so many customers, electric utilities are required to and are able to invest in technologies in modern³⁸fuel-burning or nuclear electric power plants that result in efficiencies that far exceed those of small gasoline engines, even taking losses in transmission of the energy from the plant to you into account. Those technologies extend to dealing with the byproducts (exhaust gases, spent fissile materials) in ways that are much safer for the environment than the emissions produced by millions of gasoline lawn mowers. The second answer is that in some areas of the country, electricity is produced at hydro-electric facilities and windmill farms, which, again, produce energy far more efficiently than you can, including transmission losses.

Recreation

A modern snowmobile produces the same amount of air pollution per unit time as 100 automobiles. Jet Skis are similar moving environmental disaster areas (the two-cycle engines they use also have a lot of oil in their exhaust, which ends up in the water where they are used). Ditto for All Terrain Vehicles (ATVs). Aside from air and water pollution, these machines are extremely noisy, which can frighten wildlife out of their usual patterns and habitats. They can also damage environmentally sensitive terrain and waters. Unfortunately, there has been tremendous growth in their use in recent years. If you are on the highway in Maine or upstate New York during the winter months, you will see many big SUVs and pickup trucks towing trailers with 1, 2, and sometimes 4 snowmobiles aboard.

Add your voice to those protesting the use of these environment-destroying machines. The US Fish and Wildlife Service recently instituted stricter rules against snowmobiling in Yellowstone National Park than the lax regulations recently drawn up by - you guessed it - the Bush Administration. The Park Rangers hate these machines. They have to wear ear protectors and have respiratory problems due to the air pollution they produce.