Our World and Everything in It

I read Mitch Albom’s column in the Free Press this past Sunday, and although I agree with him, I think it was well, um, a little bit dated. His perception that environmentalists are a league of people still derided as Chicken Littles is a little off. As long as I’ve been writing this blog, I think maybe I’ve been called a Chicken Little twice. I had one opponent that appeared to be a drinker going off into raves eventually calling me a cur so as to not get axed from the website for calling me something worse. But that was long ago. Another opponent eventually came to terms with the fact that on a lot of levels we are simpatico. We agreed that we do indeed create trash and should be cleaning up after ourselves, whether or not it does or does not contribute to global warming. Isn’t this moment of agreement in the environmental argument all that’s needed? Because cleaning up after ourselves is the first step to realizing just how much garbage we actually create, which should logically lead to more conservation efforts regardless of global warming.

In this light, how the pro-environmental argument is presented seems to make a heck of a lot of difference. Finding common ground brings people to agreement faster, and that’s what seems to be happening. Unlike Albom, I’m seeing a huge surge of environmentalism on TV and the Internet lately. My 85-year old mother pointed it out to me about 2 weeks ago. I paid closer attention after that and she’s right. There are all types of commercials on TV that are telling people to buy in bulk, don’t shampoo their hair every day, you know insidious mantra that eventually gets an entire population moving toward conservation without knowing it. Admit it. We’re herded more times than not and industry with the help of the media is like the rancher.

I blogged about industry moving the green market quite a while back. Industry’s push to go “green” is getting increasingly stronger because they can’t afford high energy costs either. GE can hardly keep up with the demand for its industrial wind turbines. Green rooftops are appearing on city buildings everywhere thanks to newly formed environmental organizations like Green Roofs for Healthy Cities. And just look up companies growing in leaps and bounds like Sun Edison, who provides an affordable way for industry to benefit from rooftop solar panels, that is, if they aren’t already planted green. Retail giant Wal-Mart starting moving to go green, and now companies like SC Johnson are looking to supply those big stores with their “totally” green .products. Even Conoco Philips (Big Oil) threw in the towel, and joined Tyson Chicken to create biofuel from chicken fat at no real profit, just because it’s the right thing to do for the environment. And when moguls like Ted Turner make statements that it’s absolute suicide to continue to pollute and consume the way we do, well, try calling terrible Ted a “CL.”

I’ve lost count of all the home improvement shows that tout “green,” as well as, media outlets like PBS, Discovery, Science, and National Geographic channels that consistently show the latest findings and discoveries regarding the environment and man. I’ve even watched Canadian TV like “The Outsider,” or “The Fifth Estate” air documentaries about U.S. government cover ups of scientific reports relative to global warming. I’m seeing more and more green shows coming out of Canada now. And I can’t say enough for organizations listed as links on my blog like EarthJustice, The Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife, Union of Concerned Scientists, and many others that don’t think twice to take on the U.S. Government or anyone else over the environment and wildlife. While we sleep, or go about our usual day, these guys are out on cold oceans, at the edge of public forests, in congress, and everywhere they need to be to stop bad things from happening to our world and everything in it.

But best of all when I see Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich in a commercial urging citizens to contact congress to push ahead to embrace environmentalism, it’s a clear indication that forces are looking to gather against the old energy lobbyists and the spin machine. This was topped off last week when Henry Waxman, Chairman of the Committee for Oversight and Reform, sent a letter to EPA Administrator Johnson, that he need be prepared to testify regarding the recently released Union of Concerned Scientists Report documenting extensive and widespread political interference with the work of scientists at EPA. Yes!!!

Add to that the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that the EPA should be regulating CO2 emissions from autos as part of the Clean Air Act, and the U.S. Court of Appeals vacating the EPA’s “Clean Air Mercury Rule,” literally throwing out the EPA’s cap and trade system for mercury, and demanding the EPA set new standards for the coal burning industry within two years. Concurrently, it also vacated the EPA’s “Incinerator Rule.” This bodes exceptionally well for the Chicken Little movement.

The timing is uncanny, but unlike Mr. Albom’s perception of environmental efforts, this past Sunday, for the first time in a very long time, I was optimistic about environmentalism, my faith in America restored. After researching the onslaught against our parks, our air, our water, animals, and their habitat for so long by the Bush/Cheney administration, I finally sensed a real, hardy shove back by the other powers that be, which is American industry and ingenuity. They don’t seem to suffer low self-esteem as a “Chicken Little” crowd at all. Had Mitch written about the “CL” complex a year ago I might have wholeheartedly agreed. But now, all I see is the “greening” of America, like it or not. As for “Chicken Little” calling, sticks and stones…

I saw the Mileage Master on GMA last week. It’s an invention by 69-year old Fred Crane. Of course it didn’t go into any explanation how the gizmo works because the patent is still pending. But if you install a Mileage Master (when they are available), you will be able to flip a switch at 35 mph and cut off fuel to half your cylinders. Crane says he gets 42 mpg on his current car, but the one he had before got a whopping 60-mpg.

Crane is feisty. He won’t sell out to the oil companies. He thinks, “They would just throw it away.” He also says that if you get 20 mpg and spend $100 per month, you could lower that bill to $35.00 with his gizmo. This should be on the market sooner than the prototype electric car. Now if a 69 year old man come up with this tinkering around, we have to wonder don’t we?

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=4464201&page=1

Ian Wright is an entrepreneur that’s out to change the perception of electric cars, that they are slugs or as he called them in a GMA article “golf carts.” Well he’s built a $150,000 prototype that goes 170 mph, and is all electric. It looks like a little racecar. Sharp. But it won’t be a production car for 12 years. But this does go to show that electric cars may be a possibility after all. In everything I read I couldn’t find how they recharge these cars. The first link in the first paragraph also takes you to other prototypes like the T-Zero car.

Read about it and see it: http://www.wrightspeed.com/x1.html.
 

Last week on Good Morning America there was a guy who has been fueling his little diesel car with Chinese oil. What is Chinese oil? It’s the leftover oil from Chinese restaurants. He said the restaurant was only too happy to give the oil away. He put it in a plastic gas container and uses a funnel to put it in his car. He said he probably saved $3,000 last year by not buying gas. So if you have a little diesel car you drive to work, why not? The Welsh do it. The Welsh were using so much vegetable oil in their cars they had to come up with laws to stop it because the country wasn’t getting enough money from gas tax. The big clue? Everytime there was a new delivery of cooking oil to the supermarkets, the shelves were wiped out in hours. Now the Welsh police are allowed to stop a car and look at what it’s running in its tank. 

On that note, I ran across something good from an oil company. While I was researching oil company contributions to alternative energy, I read that Conoco Phillips is working with Tyson foods to use chicken fat for fuel.  Reuters.com has the entire article. The article stated: “Beef, pork and chicken fat from Tyson rendering plants will be processed at ConocoPhillips refineries to create transportation fuel.” They plan in the future to produce about 175 million gallons per year of this biodiesel. Conoco Phillips is already preparing some of their refineries for processing the animal fat. The first one is in Borger, Texas. ConocoPhillips is processing soybean oil as a biodiesel fuel already at its Whitegate refinery in Cork, Ireland. Tyson said “the fats will be processed with hydrocarbon feedstocks to produce a high-quality diesel fuel that meets all federal standards for ultra-low-sulfur diesel.” And unlike ethanol, this fuel can run through pipelines. 

This is good news. These two companies are making good use of leftover pollution, and there is a lot of it in the meatpacking industry. Since Conoco Phillips doesn’t stand to gain or lose from doing this, this is a very generous move.  I just hope finding a way to get rid of rendering material doesn’t cause a spike in eating more meat, or establishing more CAFO’s! There is a humane and ethical side to the treatment of animals that figures in here, not just the environment, or money. Industrialized farming is extremely horrific for animals, totally inhumane, and we end up with sickly meat.

http://www.reuters.com/article/consumerproducts-SP/idUSN1629340720070416?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0

Here is a link to a list of organic body care products found to contain 1,4-Dioxane, a carcinogen linked to breast cancer.

http://www.organicconsumers.org/bodycare/DioxaneResults08.cfm

 Finding the list, I found this really good website for people who go organic even sometimes. It is Organic Consumers Association website. This is the largest organization of organic consumers in the country. They have been campaigning for the USDA and organic companies to preserve strict organic standards. I don’t think a responsible company should have to be pressured to do this but considering the warning list above…help by joining the campaign. Look around the OCA website. It covers all types of topics even children’s health.

The basic premise of the Organic Consumers Association as it relates to food is that change for pure food is in the consumer’s hands. Buying locally grown and harvested organic fruits and vegetables as much as possible assures better quality control in a product. And many times this means buying from a smaller farm market. I do this all of the time, always have. It’s cheaper and much of the produce, even chicken, is from Michigan, and raised naturally. I grow my own fruits and vegetables too.

By supporting smaller local farms we help spread the wealth around and show congress that we’re serious about eating healthy foods so that the next time the Farm Bill comes around maybe we can change it for the better. The Farm Bill needs to address the needs of local farmers who want to be good stewards of their land, and despite a big farm lobby.

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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.  

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.
 

I finally broke down and bought a new gas range and gas dryer today. I put it off because I have a habit of keeping things as long as they work well. Keep them looking nice and hey, they’re vintage. I also have a propensity for anthropomorphism, which is endowing inanimate objects with a human or animal persona. You know, fishermen refer to their boats as she and give them names. Ditto for vehicles. We can also get too attached to our homes, like they are part of the family or something, well, with feelings anyway.  For me, it is anything that has given me years of service that is still hanging in there. My range and dryer are 22 years old!  I haven’t named them but have had them an awfully long time. Of course each piece has had a minor repair or two through the years but nothing to speak of. Things were just made better back then.

I don’t like my new refrigerator, washer, or dishwasher as well as my old. Newer things are made so shabbily. There are all types of plastic parts on them that break. Even though there aren’t any kids running around my house, and I maintain things well, parts broke on my fridge the first year I owned it. And a funny thing happened to the washer. I bought a washer with a stainless drum inside, but on the outside of that is a plastic drum. It’s pretty thick plastic, but not thick enough. One of those studs used in a nail gun worked its way through one of those tiny drain holes in the stainless drum, then proceeded to score the spinning outer “plastic” drum enough times that water eventually poured out of the bottom during a rinse cycle.

Going to buy two new appliances because a good deal was to be had wasn’t a good motivator for me either. I will miss my old range and dryer, well not so much miss as feel bad they are going to be destroyed. They still work. If they didn’t work, it would be a whole different story. I thought about donating the appliances, but they are so old the trip would probably kill them.

I was assured at the store that the appliances that are hauled away are recycled. Good to know. I looked around and found that most major home appliances consist of about 75 percent steel. Scrap steel is needed to make new steel. Steel manufacturers count on recycled material as do copper, aluminum, and zinc manufacturers. So I’m helping the steel industry. Do we have a steel industry? I also found an old article that stated: “According to the Environmental Protection Agency, using recycled steel results in an 86% reduction in water pollution and a 97% reduction in mining wastes.” Who knew?

So my fear of filling a landfill with my old appliances is no longer relevant and I can think of all this as a rejuvenation process for them. Good then.  Out with the old, and in with the new. I cook every night.  I deserve a new stove. As for the dryer, I use it as little as possible. I hang my clothes out in the summer. But my winter dryer bill should surely drop. I made sure I purchased a dryer with moisture sensors so that it doesn’t stay on any longer than necessary. Oh, and I did get a good deal.
 

I caught the end of a program on the Science Channel tonight that featured Stirling Energy Technologies. Stirling has been around since the 80’s relative to alternative energy sources. Stirling is not selling retail to the public on an individual basis yet, but considering I have a large satellite dish out here in the boonies I would have no problem owning a solar dish in the future.

The FAQ page for Stirling describes: 

Our Solar Dish Stirling system is shaped much like large satellite dishes (approximately 37’ in diameter) and covered with curved mirrors. These solar dishes are programmed to always face the sun and focus that energy on a collector in much the same way that a satellite dish focuses radio waves on a tuner. This collector is connected to a Stirling engine, which uses the thermal power generated by the focused solar energy to heat liquid hydrogen in a closed-loop system. The expanding hydrogen gas creates a pressure wave on the pistons of the Stirling engine, which spins an electric motor creating electricity with no fuel cost or pollution. This technology is referred to as solar thermal or concentrating solar power.

The company also says that at a “power plant producing 1,000 MW, the cost per kWh would be less than ten cents,” and “[o]ne dish on an annual basis can produce 55,000-60,000 kWh of electricity. This is equivalent to the total energy required for 8-10 homes in the U.S.” ChaChing!

Stirling may save the Western part of our country in the future. Right now Stirling is planning a solar field 5 miles square in the desert that will supply the entire city of San Diego with electricity. Of course as more of this type of technology is utilized, the more the engineers can improve and modify, modify, modify. Remember computers back in the 70’s? I used to do keypunch and then worked on a desktop computer in U of M hospital’s personnel dept. The mainframe to those computers back then took up a whole room. We had to type the info on forms with 7 carbon copies first, then input the data too because we couldn’t trust that the system wouldn’t go down and dump everything. The miracle of innovation, and modification is apparent as I type this on my little laptop that I can take anywhere and doesn’t even require a mouse. See what I mean?

The sooner we unleash all the technology that is out there to see what we actually can come up with, the sooner it gets modified down to convenient personal size. Right now it would take 20,000 dishes to equal a coalburner or nuke plant. But with future innovation and modification in no time we could see that number down to hundreds as the size of the equipment is reduced. Better yet our own personal dish, and mini power station no bigger than a small boiler that produces everything we need with absolutely no fuel used or pollution produced to keep us nice and cool as the sun sears on.  Am I taking it too far? I don’t think so.

Read more about Stirling: http://www.stirlingenergy.com/faq.asp?Type=all

Watched Oprah’s “Green” show tonight, and learned some things I’ll pass along here.  I know it’s a rerun, but hey, I missed it the first time around.  She handed out reusable cloth grocery bags first, reminding everyone that it takes 1000 years for plastic to break down. I know what most of the ladies in the audience were thinking. How are we supposed to get a huge shopping basket of goods into that little bag? It’s only good for small trips. My answer is to look for grocery stores that recycle those bags in bins in the bottle return area. I don’t throw mine out. I swear I can cram 50 plastic bags into one. I’ve got a trunk full for drop off now. Also look for paper recycling drop offs near your home. I reuse big plastic shopping bags to collect and cart my junk mail and any paper for recycling.

Recycle your clothes, your sports equipment, fitness equipment, appliances, yard gear, aluminum foil, and glass, just about everything. Have yard sales and meet your neighbors. My neighborhood has them all the time. Here are some interesting statistics that were on the show relative to recycling and conservation:

We use 10 billion paper bags per year that takes 14 million trees to produce.
We use 380 billion plastic bags. Try bringing your own, and then recycle.
Junk mail uses 100 million trees and 20 billion gals. of water a year.
We ask for 8 billion ATM receipts a year. It is equal to a roll of paper 2 billion ft. long that would wrap around the equator 15 times.
Using 1 less 2-ply napkin a day will save one billion tons of paper waste per year.
It takes 5 liters of water to make the plastic bottle for just one liter of water. Use re-useable bottles and for Pete’s sake get a water tap filter! New Wave Enviro products have personal reusable plastic bottles with built in filters.
Oh and our little obsession with bottled water costs big money, enough to provide the entire world with clean drinking water.

Some brand names that provide really good green products are 7th Generation, Meyers, Method reusable micro-fiber clothes. And Shaklee has been producing all natural cleaning products for years. People rave about a product called H2. Two drops of the natural cleaner in a container of water will clean everything in your house, and it works.

Americanforest.org is a website where you can buy a tree for $1 each and they will plant it. It’s the least we can do considering. And for absolutely stunning cinematography, do not miss “Planet Earth” on the Discovery Channel. I’ve seen some of it. We were given the care of such a beautiful, majestic planet, and pretty much pigged it up. The DVD and book are also available in stores. This DVD could be thought of as an heirloom for future generations to witness. For those of you out there who have pooh, poohed the poor polar bear this is heart-wrenching stuff. A woman said it changed her life when she watched a polar bear swim, and swim, and swim in what is now open water to the point of exhaustion. He finally found land where he dug the hole that would be his grave. He curled up and died.

For more statistics and tips look for The Green Book a Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time by Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas M. Kostigen.

A lot of the info came from Sundance at http://www.sundancechannel.com/thegreen.