make a smaller ecological footprint

inspired by Alvie, my family will also participate in Earth hour tonight at 8pm. Not only will we shut off all the lights for an hour, but we will unplug all wall warts and shut off all electrical appliances except for the refrigerators and the alarm clocks. A self-imposed, one hour blackout. Our hope is that someone will actually check the electrical use records for earth hour some day, and we want to make as small a footprint, for that hour at least, that we can reasonably manager.

Go, Australia!

Well, it had to happen eventually, right? Although they last 7-10 times longer than an incandescent bulb, even compact fluorescent bulbs burn out eventually.

But of course fluorescent bulbs contain a few mg of mercury. And that’s bad for the environment. Can you just toss them in the trash can? Seems like a “big footprint” kind a behavior.

So I did some research. Here’s the EPA website with CFL information, which tells you to put it in your hazardous waste disposal stream. They recommend (as does everybody else) putting it in a plastic bag (I think the bag acts like a getter to bind the mercury after the bulb breaks) before disposing of it.

Sure enough, in CT, I can just toss them in the trash, but where’s the environmentally friendliness of that?

Ok, so I did some more math. I’ve heard that hot water is the source of a lot of our environmental impact, so I calculated it. Here’s the analysis, if you want to do it for your own home.

It takes 4.2kJoules of energy to head 1 kg of water 1 degree C.

1 kJoule/second = 1 kiloWatt. 3600 seconds per hour. So there are 3600 kJoules in a kiloWatt-hour. Or it takes 1.17 Watt-hours per liter per degree C.

You can measure the water flow rate of your shower and multiply by your shower length to get a total amount of water per shower. I just estimated 90 liters (20+ gallons) per shower, per the DoE.

My water heater is set to 160 degrees F. That’s 71 degrees C. Figure the water temperature I like in a hot shower is full-bore on hot. That’s conservative, but it makes the math easier. Then the total thermal loss in transmission is cancelled out, and we can calculate the energy required to heat my shower water:

liters of water x (71-5)degrees x 1.17 Watt-hours/degree/liter =

6.95 kW-h per shower to heat the water. At $0.12 per KW-h, it costs about 80 cents to take a shower. I calculated the energy costs to pump the water from the bottom of the well, but it was negligible (about $0.03 per shower).

Using my old conversion rate of 70% efficiency, and 47 kWh/gallon of oil, and one shower a day, my warm showers are consuming 78 gallons of oil per year.

If I can reduce every shower from 6 minutes to 5, say, I can save $50 a year, and burn 13 less gallons of oil.

I need a timer in the bathroom…

From the Amtrak website:

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has reported that Amtrak – on an energy consumed per passenger-mile basis – is 18 percent more energy efficient than commercial airlines. According to DOE’s Transportation Energy Data Book, Amtrak energy intensity was 2,935 British Thermal Units (BTUs) per passenger-mile and commercial airlines were 3,587. Commuter rail was 2,751 and automobiles were 3,549 BTUs. The DOE figures are from calendar year 2003, the latest available.

Train travel is no environmental panacea, but it does seem to be slightly more fuel-efficient than airfare and car. Interestingly though, air travel and car travel are about equal.

I’m working up the ledger, at long last, for the ecological impact of my family. Without a more accurate map of the impact, I can’t be confident the changes I am making are really having sufficient impact.

I figure we use about 2,000 gallons of heating oil a year, but I’m going to get the exact number going forward. This month, we used 93 gallons, but I’ve already set the thermostat down to the point that we all wear sweatshirts in the house.

We get two tanks of gas a week, at about 15 gallons per tank. That’s 1,500 gallons of gasoline. Easy to monitor.

What about electricity? We are burning an average of 47 kwh per day. If I assume my electricity is all oil-based, and that 70% of the generation cost is fuel, that’s about a gallon a day, or 360 gallons a year of electrical “fuel”. That’s hardly anything, compared to the heating oil and the gas!

Then there is airfare; I hear a lot of bad things about that, too. Lesse. I travel domestically 10 times a year, and international 1.5 times per year. According to the carbon offset websites, this is as bad as taking a chainsaw to an acre of brazilian rainforest, or thereabouts. But something doesn’t wash. Jet fuel is going for about $2/gallon right now, bought by the ton. A domestic flight costs $300, and the international ones are usually twice that. Even assuming half the cost is fuel, which is unlikely, the total fuel consumption of all my flying every year is… 862 gallons. Assuming a more reasonable fuel cost percentage gets it to about 500 gallons a year. Sure it’s a lot, but compared to my car and heating oil, it’s a short pole. It could be that, because the fuel is being burned in the atmosphere, it makes a bigger environmental impact. if anyone has a reference, I’ll take it.

(BTW, for those doing their own carbon calculations like me, you could get more detailed. A 737 holds 6,700 gallons of fuel, and when full, carries 115 passengers. It can go coast to coast and back without refuelling, so figure 3,000 gallons one way. For a specific trip from JFK to SFO, on a full aircraft, each passenger should expect to burn 50 gallons of jet fuel, round trip)

Then there is trash. Packaging, cardboard, paper, cans, bottles. I’m already all over this like white on rice, so we’re not throwing that much into the land-fill, but I’ll need to get more specific here as well.

Finally groceries, consumables, and the like. My son uses the metric of 30% of the price is fuel costs for all goods and services, but that might be low, when you consider most things today are made in china or south america and flown or shipped here. But based on that, I can get a calculation going here as well. Using his numbers, though, we burned another 200 gallons of fuel this month on our consumables. At 2,500 gallons a year, this is my second biggest item.

Long story short; the mathematical model is coming together, and anyone who has already developed some spreadsheets for this and is willing to share, I’d be much obliged. But the best way to decrease my family’s footprint seems to be…spend less money on goods and services, and buy food locally. Oh, and maybe move that thermostat down one more point…

Here’s one for all you fellow “dogoodniks” for the planet. Eat local produce.

I kid you not.

If you surf the carbon offset sites, you see that air travel is horrible for the environment. Example; I am flying next month to Paris; CO2 cost, 3,100kg. Check out any of the air-travel CO2 calculators.

Now if we are getting a flat of 10kg of grapes (including packaging, remember) from Santiago, Chile to New York, that takes the same amount of carbon as about 1 10th of a passenger, right? But Santiago one-way is a little shorter than PAris round-trip. Long story short, that 10kg flat of grapes, yielding about 5kg of fruit for about $20, costs the planet 263kg of CO2!!!!

That’s the same as driving an SUV for 1,500 km!!!

Buy local produce, and help decrease the demand for air-freighted fruit from the southern hemisphere. It makes a big difference.