Turn Green

I have a friend who related a conversation he had with a Chinese friend, the conversation went like this.

“I don’t understand you Americans”

“Why?”

“You have big yards, every weekend you put down fertilizer and weed killer, mow the grass, bag it up and throw it away.”

“So?”

“In China, we would have a vegetable garden, and keep chickens and pigs. That yard would feed 10 - 12 people.”

I’m probably paraphrasing the conversation, but the guy makes a good point.

When I was much younger, my parents always had a garden in the backyard, probably 200 to 300 square feet, we always had green beans, tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, squashes, onions, pumpkins, watermelons and other assorted vegetables. Whenever we stayed at my grandmothers house in the summer we’d go to the local produce farms and orchards, to pick bushels of green beans and peaches. Whatever we didn’t eat right away, my grandmother canned and put away for later, it seemed like she had endless amounts of those in the fall and winter. I later learned that the peach orchards were killed when the oil companies started injecting salt water into the wells which contaminated the ground water, and the produce farms were later turned into housing developments.

I have a big yard, 1/3 of an acre, and I probably spend 6 or so hours a week maintaining it. I don’t use fertilizer and weed killer, my mower mulches the cuttings, any leaves that I rake up usually go into the compost pile, but I still spend time mowing and watering to have a good looking yard. We usually have a small vegetable garden, a couple of tomato plants, peppers and maybe onions.

With the rise in food prices, mainly due to fuel prices, we’ve started looking at expanding our garden to include other fruits and vegetables. I look at it this way, every square foot of garden is one less square foot of mowing. And if the garden gets big enough to start canning things, we’ll move in that direction too. So for our reference here are a couple of sites.

Square Foot Gardening

Texas A & M Vegetable Gardening

If you have any other links that you’d like to share, please do so in the comments, along with any gardening successes or tips.

Reading, who would of thought that paperback books would be $7.95 and up? That gets to be expensive when you go through 2-3 a month, and, if you are like me you can’t wait for the book to move from hardcover to paperback so you buy the hardcover for $24.95 and up. So you end up with a bookshelf full of books that you’ve read once and some that you want to keep for awhile.

A couple of years ago my family and I visited Seattle, and the Pacific Northwest, specifically the Olympic Peninsula. While driving around the peninsula we got to see the effects of clear cutting first hand. It was like someone took a big razor and just ran it up the hillside, we vowed right then and there to reduce our paper usage.

For a while we used our Palm Pilots with e-reader software and downloaded our books. But there is just something about having a book in your hands, the feel and smell of the paper just cannot be replaced.

Back to the present, my daughter is just learning how to read, my wife and I still enjoy books but it is getting too expensive, and we have piles of books on the bookshelf. We’ve started sharing books among friends, and we trade our books in at a second hand bookstore. The second hand bookstore is a sham, we found out that they buy every book everyone brings them for pennies each. If they need the book they’ll put it on their shelves, if not, they rip the cover off and throw them in the dumpster. That’s not our idea of reusing something.

So Saturday we decided to do something different, we went to the library and got our library cards. I haven’t had one of those since I was in college and I had forgotten what it is like just to browse around, find the book you want and check it out for a couple of weeks. The library is no more of a hassle than running down to the local bookstore, and best of all it’s free and we don’t have to find a way to exchange or gift our old books.

So save some money and some trees, and take yourself to the library.

It’s only the start of June and it’s hot here in Austin. In the last couple of weeks we have already had a couple of 100 degree days, and the hot part of the year isn’t here yet. Thankfully we have a couple of ways of beating the heat around our house. The best one is the pool in the backyard, nothing is better than going out and splashing around in the water for an hour or two during the heat of the day. Unfortunately our pool is a little sick right now, we’ve had an outbreak of mustard algae, so the chemical treatments to get rid of it preclude swimming at times, but we can usually schedule the chemicals for an off use period. What’s this have to do with being “green”, aside from having to run the filter more than I’d like, not much except it is a great way to cool down.

Speaking of cooling down, have you changed your A/C filter recently? It is the first of the month, and it is recommended that you change the filter on your A/C every month or two. You see as the filter traps more and more dust, it allows less and less air to pass through, causing your A/C to work harder and longer to cool your house, wasting electricity. So go change that dirty filter, while you’re at it, check your smoke detectors too.

I know, it’s been a while since I’ve posted, there is just so much on my list of stuff to do that this blog falls to the end.  I have a list of things that I want and need to do here, but I can’t seem to make the time to do it.  I’ll try to be better, I promise.

The current recycling plan here in Austin is called curbside recycling. It’s a mess, currently, we can only recycle #1 and #2 plastic bottles (no other shapes or forms of plastic), glass, metal cans, cardboard (no paperboard), and paper. However, the “rules” for recycling are complicated, cardboard has to be cut to 2′ x 2′ squares and bundled together with string or twine, paper has to go into a separate bin from the glass, metal and plastic. You almost have to have a degree in science to figure out what you can and cannot recycle.

Starting in October we are going to “Single Stream” Recycling, that is we are going to get a big blue plastic cart that we can put all of our recycling in. And now its going to be all cardboard, paper, metal, glass jar’s and bottles, and all types of rigid plastics #1 through #7. This is going to be a huge improvement over the current plan.

It used to be that I never wonder what happened to the things I put in the recycling bin. The men came every Wednesday, dumped the bins into the truck and off it went. I slept easy knowing that I was doing as much as I could to recycle. The truth is somewhat different now that I’ve done some reading and research. After it gets to the recycling center here, it’s all sorted into different piles according to what it is. If the items are contaminated by whatever- food or other waste, chemicals, etc. it’s sent to the landfill. Let’s look at a couple of the things that are shipped out of the center.

Scrap Paper - This is your old newspapers, junk mail, catalogs and such. According to the March 10, 2008 Paper Stock Report, US domestic demand for scrap paper in December 2007 was around 2.8 million tons, this is paper that is reused within the US for what ever purpose. Exports of scrap paper for the same month were 2.6 million tons, this is paper that the US exports for whatever reason to a foreign country, and the biggest buyer of the scrap paper? China. That’s right millions of tons of scrap paper is exported to China for recycling and re-use. However a portion of that paper is rejected for whatever reasons and is either put into a landfill there or burned. China takes our scrap paper, reuses it for cardboard, paper, or pulp packaging, puts whatever item in it , and exports it to the store down the street, where we buy whatever gadget we need.

Metals - The same thing happens to metal, its sorted into types then either reused domestically or exported. I don’t have firm numbers on the amounts, but one report I’ve read says that 95,414 short tons of non-ferrous scrap was shipped in February. By the way this metal is used to make the cases, screws to make the items packed in the boxes made from the paper above.

I now wonder how much it costs to transport all this material. Is the energy saved by recycling so great that the costs in diesel, and fuel oil for the trucks, trains and ships to transport this material halfway around the globe is offset? What about the emissions from the above vehicles along with whatever emissions the recycling plant puts out? Especially in a country that does not seem to have very strong environmental laws. Would it make more sense environmentally and economically to reprocess it here in the US then export the material?

I don’t know the answers to the above but I know, I’ll still be putting out the recycling every week.

Back in January, my wife and I nearly had a heart attack when we received our electric bill, it was around $450-500, and it was almost entirely due to heating the house. During the winter, the house isn’t kept at a tropical 80 degrees, I believe the thermostat is programed for 72 degrees when we are home, when we are gone it’s programmed for 68 degrees. This is when we decided that we had enough of this, and that we needed to do something, but what? Turning down the thermostat didn’t seem to be an option that would save us much. I decided that I would venture up into the attic to take a look.

When our house was built, the builders used blown in insulation to insulate the attic space above the ceilings, and they put just enough in to fill to the top of the rafters, a whole 6-7 inches of insulation. So to figure out the R-value of the insulation I went to the U.S. Department of Energy’s web site, taking the value of 3.6/inch of blown cellulose insulation we had a whopping R-22 up in the attic, the same website says that we should have an R-value between R-30 and R-60. I then called one of the local service companies to get a quote on installing additional insulation in the attic. The person who showed up took some measurements and recommended that we install an additional 8-10 inches of insulation for the 800 sf of accessible attic space, taking us up to at least R-49, recommended for this part of the country. His final quote was $800.00, I almost signed a check right there to have it done, but I held off to do a little research.

Visiting one of the big box home improvement stores websites, I found that they sold bags of cellulose insulation for $6.87/bag, each bag covering 40sf to an R value of 19. Doing the math, I determined that we needed 25 bags of insulation to get to the recommended value. The big box store also rented the blower, however if you purchased 20 bags or more, you got the use of the blower free for 24hrs. The total cost for us to do ourselves was going to be in the neighborhood of $175.

That weekend we made a trip to the store, rented a truck, bought the insulation, got the blower and headed home. Installation was easy, my wife ran the blower and loaded the bags of insulation into it, and I got to crawl around the attic blowing it in. It was messy though, we both wore goggles, face masks and ear plugs. I did need an additional light in the attic as the dust cut visibility down to a couple of feet, and a tape measure to check on the depth in the area I was working in. 5 hours later we had added 10 inches of insulation throughout the entire attic.

We are still waiting to see what kind of energy savings we are going to see, but the way I look at it, adding the insulation didn’t hurt anything, didn’t take a lot of time or money, and it does seem the A/C is running a little less.

Where to start, that’s always the question. I guess I’ll start by giving some background about our family, our house and what we hope to accomplish with this blog. We are a “average” family of three, middle class income, 2 adults, 1 child, and a dog living in a ~1800 sf house built in 1976, in Austin, TX.

I barely remember the 70’s, as I was 8 years old when our current home was built, and was to busy being a kid to pay much attention to what was going on with the economy and such. But what I do remember was the energy crisis and the price of gold and silver skyrocketing. From what I’ve been reading there was also massive inflation, a recession, and a housing shortage during that period of time. When houses were built during the later part of the 70’s not much thought was given to energy efficiency and environmental friendliness. It was pretty much get them built with as low a cost as possible.

Fast forward to today, there is an energy crunch with gas at $3.69 / gallon, the economy is stagnant, gold and silver prices are up, and we are living in a house that is not energy efficient.

Our house is all electric, meaning every thing is powered by electricity. The air conditioning / heating, and the water heater are the big users when it comes to electric use in our home. Our electric bill averages $250.00/month with it spiking around $400.00 in January, February, July, August and September, prime heating and cooling months in Austin. When we purchased the house in 2006 it already had a SEER 13 Heat Pump installed so we aren’t going to see any improvement in our electric usage by upgrading to a newer system.

We are going to make the house more efficient, more environmentally friendly and do it in a way that is not going to break the bank. Most of this is going to revolve around our family changing our habits, some smart improvements to the house and some long term upgrades.

This blog is our attempt to document and share this adventure and you are invited to come along with us, hopefully inspiring you to make some changes also.