Our World and Everything in It

My girlfriend just bought a Prius. A touring Prius, which is a little bigger and comparable to a four-door sedan. She and her husband went to the auto show in search of a true hybrid, and mulled over the idea of a Prius. He already has a little Ford Focus and loves it. She said she would have gladly bought American, but they didn’t have much. I told her American cars are soon to get their parts from all over the place, pretty much do already, and hopefully vice versa for the foreign cars. So the term American means the company, not where the labor, the parts, or the money comes from.

I don’t blame her for getting a Prius. Her 12-year-old Buick Roadmaster had seen its better days and had 108,000 miles on it. She wanted to be environmentally friendly this time around and cut her gas bill to nothing. She only uses the car to drive around Monroe, MI, and to and from work probably less than an 8-mile round trip everyday. If she takes the back roads, that Prius will only be using gas to keep the electric motor running.

We all packed in her new car Saturday night and went for a ride. I was in the front and have to say it felt like I was in a Jetson mobile. The windshield is long, and angled and so is the dashboard, so the digital readout is way in front of you. Very futuristic. It’s doesn’t have the walled in feeling of a regular dashboard. There is a small monitor in the middle of it that shows all type of functions. My friend’s husband left the screen on consumption. What shows is an animated picture of the underside of the car, the wheels turning, and arrows showing the direction the energy is going to and coming from. The Prius is supposed to switch from electric to a mix of electric and gas at 25 mph, and then to gasoline alone after 55 mph. On the highway, it gets 47 mpg on top of that.  Surprisingly her Prius didn’t do that. It didn’t use gas until 37 mph sometimes. That was an added bonus.

When we approached the railroad tracks, her husband shifted a gear on the console and didn’t bother to brake because that shift slowed the car down to a crawl instead. I guess slowing down is as bad as taking off as far as fuel consumption. The shift slows the car down gradually without a lot of friction.

Other things we found out: You don’t have to have your keys in hand to get in. Her Prius reads the key fob in her pocket as she walks up to the car and unlocks it. She only needs to step on the brake and push a button to start the car. When she’s backing up, the monitor shows her what’s behind and what she is approaching along with a back-up alarm.  And her Prius is really roomy inside, albeit another car where you feel like you’re sitting on the floor, but for now it feels solid. She is 5′8″ and sat quite comfortable stretched in the back seat.

Tech wise it has blue tooth so she can dock her phone. There is a place for an Ipod of course. Both the phone and music are voice activated and are shown on the monitor as well. There are 7 hidden speakers surrounding the interior. And the back seats fold down creating quite a large hatchback.

Oh, I forgot. Her Prius only holds 8 gallons of gas. She bought it Thursday, January 31, 2008 and filled it up, all 8 gallons. I’ll blog when she stops to get gas for her Prius again. It’ll probably make us sick.  

 My mind works in strange ways and so all the things I’m blogging about here go together in my mind. I was watching the Super Bowl and I caught the beginning where everyone was reciting the Declaration of Independence. I thought I just wrote something with the Declaration of Independence in it, and sure enough I did a blog on the 4th of July. I was urging people to be patriotic and contact their reps to support a moratorium on CAFO’s in Michigan. That didn’t happen. As a matter of fact thanks to the MI Farm Bureau and Republican Senate, it’s easier than ever to come to Michigan with a CAFO. Go to the link about CAFO’s below and check out the aerial pictures. Tell me during downpours of rain that those lagoons don’t breach. Groundwater runoff in Michigan ultimately ends up in a lake somewhere. So the opening of the Super Bowl brought up a sore subject for me.

Today, I’m reading an article in the Detroit Free Press about botulism killing Great Lakes birds. It said: “The deaths of hundreds of loons, cormorants, gulls, long-tailed ducks and grebes were scattered across the sand washed up and rotting.” There were 2900 dead birds along a 14-mile stretch of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. That’s ugly. The botulism is being blamed on two foreign, Black Sea area, mussels and round gobies that look like minnows but fatter. Biologists think they are the cause, and it looks like warmer weather, and lower water levels contribute to the problem. The botulism is native to the Great Lakes but hasn’t been around for more than 20 years. The cycle of botulism works like this:

The lakes are warmer and more shallow. The mussels are so numerous they filter the water, which becomes clearer. The sun penetrates to the bottom farther in clear shallow water, and a type of cladophora algae over grows from the sunlight. When the algae dies, it rots and the botulism comes to life. The mussels absorb the botulism, the gobie fish eat the mussels, the birds eat the gobie fish—and ultimately die from botulism.

The article in the Free Press said that the cladophora algae flourished in the 60’s and 70’s because it was nourished by the phosphorus from fertilizer runoff and poor sewage treatment. Bans in Michigan on phosphorus and improved sewage treatment reduced that algae in the 80’s and 90’s. Well, it’s back. 50,000 birds have died from E botulism since 1999.

I remember yesterday’s game, the Declaration of Independence, the CAFOs, and now sewage. I started thinking about a proposal I did for septic systems in Michigan as an assignment for class. Boy was that an eye opener. I found a fairly current article in the Sanitation Journal that said there are over 1.2 million septic systems in Michigan, and up until a few years ago Michigan didn’t have a state sanitary code. Over 40 percent of the new homes in Michigan are in rural areas where septic systems are necessary, and new homes near the water must have above-the-ground engineered septic fields now. But what about older homes like mine?

My husband is a stickler about our septic system, but there are homes along my road that are 40 years old with the original owner in them. Many of Michigan’s septic fields are only inspected when a home sells. Get the picture? The Sanitation Journal said one of the biggest contaminants of our lakes and streams, rivers, springs and such, is failed septic systems, so that’s something the state is really watching.” I don’t know about that, not all of it anyway. I thought we were supposed to be keeping a watchful eye on the ballast water of freighters too, and look at all the mussels.  

The Detroit Free Press story link is below. It was an exceptionally poignant story because one of the biologists rounding up the dead birds found one with a band on its leg. It was an old loon he tracked for 14 years or more. A loon that kept a mate for one of the longest pairings ever recorded, and most amount of chicks raised. That would have really got to me.

 http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/?p=87.

If you want to see what I mean about CAFO’s: http://www.mythinglinks.org/FactoryFarms_WalmartManureDoc.html

More about CAFO’s: http://www.ccofdc.org/documents/CAFO.pdf

http://www.sanitationjournal.com/mstadavesnyder.html.

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008802040334

HP has found a use for leftover plastic bottles. When we return our used HP (Hewlett-Packard) print cartridges, they “undergo a multi-phase recycling process that reduces them to raw materials such as plastics and metals.” The plastic from the inkjet cartridges gets mixed with recycled bottle resin and other binders to create brand new ink cartridges according to an article in Environmental News Service. They are not remanufactured. Other cartridge suppliers have yet to do this. The amount of recycled content varies from 70 to 100 percent, while the finished product remains at HP’s highest standard.

That’s a pretty good solution for some of our leftover plastic problems considering mixing plastics usually diminishes the strength and durability of a finished product. There are 10,000 different types of plastics, and many are not compatible together. If you haven’t noticed, most recyclable bottles are stamped with numbers. These numbers are to group the different plastic materials together when reprocessing.

But new research just might change things in the future. HP has discovered a way, and according to an article by Michigan Molecular Institute, “researchers from Eastman Kodak, Eastman Chemical, and the University of Florida (UF) accomplished that goal by establishing the fundamentals of compatibilization of multiphase polymer blends.” Researchers found effective methods to compatibilize comingled-plastic waste.” In other words they’ve found a way to mix some of the normally incompatible leftover plastic we toss to make new plastic.

Sharp has developed “a new technology to blend plant-based plastic that uses corn as the raw material, and waste plastic recovered from scrapped consumer electronics” according to an article on Physorg.com.  Now this is real news because Sharp is getting away from petroleum based plastics, which is the common raw material for most plastic. I don’t think corn should take a hit again, because of its overuse by the ethanol industry, but who knows, corn today, rutabaga tomorrow as a raw material for plastic. 

With new technology coming out all the time relative to plastics, hopefully we will greatly reduce the environmental impact our leftover plastic products produce. Next on the list, we need to see plastic that easily strips away in one zip from the cloth part of those dirty disposable diapers that get tossed. Anybody got any ideas about that? 

Read more about HP at: http://world-wire.com/news/0801300001.html

About MMI’s article on mixed plastic technology read:  http://www.atp.nist.gov/eao/sp950-1/mmi.htm.

About Sharp: http://www.physorg.com/news5062.html.