Queercents

“I know that I am partly to blame, by insisting that cars run on trash.” – Al Gore on SNL

Last weekend after touring the Project 7 Ten house (a Platinum LEED Certified home); we continued our eco-romp around Venice Beach and stumbled upon the smart house several blocks away. The smart house isn’t really a house, but rather a showroom for the smart car.

Heard the buzz yet about the smart car? I’ve seen them on my European trips and they’re about to make their debut here in the US. Read the rest of this entry »

If you read any personal finance blog, you will eventually come across a post recommending you save money by switching from incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescents (CFLs). It’s a no-brainer - CFLs use only about 25% of the energy of incandescent bulbs, and they last longer, so you end up saving money despite the higher up-front cost. The lower energy consumption also means that less greenhouse gases are produced to provide the same amount of light. Even so, not everyone is choosing CFLs over incandescents. In the US, CFL market share is a mere 6%.

Consumer reluctance to switch to CFLs has resulted in government action in some countries. Australia and Canada have instituted bans on incandescent bulbs that will take effect in 2010 and 2012, respectively. Many other countries are contemplating similar measures, and various organizations are lobbying for them. But there’s a cultural cost included in these kinds of laws. Read the rest of this entry »

If it’s yellow, let it mellow
If it’s brown, flush it down.

This saying was believed to have been started by former (75-83) California Governor Jerry Brown as a way to conserve water. And I still see it around on different “green” blogs.

I was trying to figure out how much water is used in an average day, by figuring toilet flushes.
1 gallon water = .0075¢
Home Toilet = 1.6gallons per flush (gpf)
2 People flushing in a day = ~8 flushes = 12.8 gpf = .096¢
In a Year = ~4672 gpf = $35.04

It’s not a lot of money or water saved on the toilet. I thought about just going to work and using the toilets at work for 2 of my four flushes, but upon checking if the toilets at work were water conserving toilets, I found that they were not - 7 gallons per flush to my own itty bitty 1.6 gallons; so I’m back to flushing at home. Instead of grossing my room-mate out with “mellowing yellow”, the best alternative would be to collect the shower water in a bucket and pour it down the toilet instead of flushing. Read the rest of this entry »

“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” – New England proverb

About a year ago, I wrote a post called Making Peace with Plastic Grocery Bags and some suggested I should quit using altogether instead of just focusing on “recycling” plastic bags.

One reader wrote, “Plastic is just bad news period… So long story short, finding cutesy little ways of “re-using” plastic doesn’t do anything. What we need to focus on is NOT using them at all. Next time you go out to shop, use canvas or a cute basket.”

Why is plastic just bad news? According to Charlie Goodyear at the San Francisco Chronicle, “Fifty years ago, plastic bags — starting first with the sandwich bag — were seen in the United States as a more sanitary and environmentally friendly alternative to the deforesting paper bag. Now an estimated 180 million plastic bags are distributed to shoppers each year in San Francisco. Made of filmy plastic, they are hard to recycle and easily blow into trees and waterways, where they are blamed for killing marine life. They also occupy much-needed landfill space.” Read the rest of this entry »

“In the long term, the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it’s unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is the rule of nature.” – Mollie Beattie

I admit that I’m a newbie to the sustainable living movement. Only since the beginning of Queercents have I honed in on ways to save money by reducing our household consumption. Most of these ideas have come through the weekly posts submitted at the Festival of Frugality. Yet even now, the topic of sustainability is daunting. I’m not alone. Jeanine has a hard time getting through her bimonthly issue of E Magazine (E as in environmental), a subscription deposited as a stocking stuffer last Christmas. That said, we continue to give it the old college girl try.

And try we do. If you’re like us, here’s something that will help jumpstart the process. At LighterFootstep.com, Chris Baskind provides Ten First Steps to move toward a lighter, more sustainable lifestyle. One of his suggestions that made the top ten is to buy local and in season. Read the rest of this entry »

“There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.” – Marshall McLuhan

Have you heard the buzz about congestion pricing? If you live in New York or study its beloved Times, then it’s been hard to miss. Don’t know what it is, then click over to Wikipedia for a quick tutorial:

“New York congestion pricing is a proposed traffic congestion fee for vehicles traveling into or within the Manhattan central business district of New York City. The congestion pricing charge is one component of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to improve the city’s future environmental sustainability while planning for population growth, entitled PlaNYC 2030: A Greener, Greater New York. If approved and implemented, it would be the first such fee scheme enacted in the United States.” Read the rest of this entry »

“I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees.” – Dr. Seuss

The Lorax tells the story about the plight of the environment and how we need to shift our emphasis away from consumption to a sustainable quality of life. Dr. Seuss encourages 4-year-olds to save trees. As a 40-year-old, I’m trying to save the environment.

Last week, a friend sent a gift for my fortieth birthday from a service that stops junk mail, plants trees and will hopefully help save the environment. I now have a membership to GreenDimes. Here are five tips to save time and money by trying to eliminate unsolicited offers in your mailbox. Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody’s doing it. Installing bamboo flooring is beautiful and sustainable and on Earth Day, many websites were touting ideas like this one and energy efficient metal roofing to help you make your house “Greener”. I kept thinking, that’s lovely, but what happens with the waste you remove from your house, and how do I afford these luxuries? Replacing things which don’t need replacement for the sake of being “Green” is ridiculous, it just creates waste; and Bamboo flooring is expensive!

Here are my favorite easy, greener, healthy and energy efficient ways I’ve saved money!

1. Buy Used! It took me a long time to convert to buying used clothing and furniture. I thought the clothes would be gross and the furniture carried old ghosts. From Garage Sales and the Goodwill to Antiques and consigned couture clothing, buying used can work for everyone! The next time you need something, you can find it in your city online at Craigslist, or Freecycle. Read the rest of this entry »

“A cup of coffee - real coffee - home-browned, home ground, home made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils and will exorcise them all.” – Henry Ward Beecher

We like coffee in our house and enjoy plenty of it. Most weekday mornings at approximately 4:50 AM, you’ll find me emptying the moist grounds from the day before into the trash container. Over the course of a year, I’m convinced that I’ve disposed of at least one or perhaps even two curbside trash bins full of coffee grounds. That’s a lot of grounds being trucked off to the landfill. Read the rest of this entry »

“Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind.” – Author Unknown

This weekend as the temperatures moved above 80 degrees in Newport Beach, it was time to increase the timer on the lawn sprinklers. This always makes me consider how much money we are spending and wasting on water just to keep the lawn green and pretty like the Yard of Jones next door.

Daniel Wood had similar thoughts recently in an article he wrote for enRoute magazine: a Canadian publication found tableside in the boutique hotel where we stayed in Montreal. He makes some good points about our North American cultural obsession in his article entitled: Green, Green Grass. Read the rest of this entry »