Why concentrated detergent helps

I’ve been sooo busy, so just a couple of quickie posts this week.

This one was also found in Redbook in January — an article that was surely based on a public relations effort by Procter & Gamble, about why smaller bottles of laundry detergent are a good thing.

PR notwithstanding, the statistics are amazing. By late spring, Procter & Gamble (maker of Tide, Cheer, Dreft, Era and Gain) will eliminate large detergent bottles and switch completely to concentrated versions of its detergents.

The results of the switch, purely from the perspective of the bottles’ environmental impact, will be huge:

• 35% less water.
• 43% less plastic (equivalent to about 2 billion plastic shopping bags each year).
• Total packaging reduction equivalent to the municipal solid waste of 40,000 people per year (about 32,000 tons, according to Redbook’s garbage data).
• Greenhouse-gas reduction equal to the annual emissions of 40,000 cars (that’s as if 16,000 households gave up their average 2.5 cars).

Of course, it’s also a good idea to pay attention to what’s inside the detergent bottle — making sure it has as few chemicals, brighteners, whiteners and especially phosphates as possible. But for the United States and the environment as a whole, smaller bottles are at least one helpful step.

Talking trash

I was pleased to see, in the January issue of Redbook magazine, a list of eye-opening statistics about our trash, as a nation.

Their information includes:

• 4.4: In pounds, the average amount of waste generated per person per day in the United States as of 2001 (in 1960 we generated 2.7 pounds per person per day).
• 50%: Percentage of the world’s garbage produced by the United States (we have 6 percent of the world’s population).
• 500,000: Number of trees that could be saved each week if everyone recycled their Sunday newspapers.
• 50%: Percentage of all U.S. paper that’s now recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

I’m not sure about some of those numbers — does the last one mean we purchase 50% recycled paper, or we recycle 50% of the paper we use? — but it is fantastic to see a huge magazine (that I’ll recycle, after hopefully giving it to someone else to read first) talking trash.

My new old lamp

About two weeks ago, Mr. Cheap and I were evaluating our living room and decided that what we want is less modern, more cozy. And especially, we need more light in a room with no overhead fixtures and some very dark corners.

Thinking about what would best replace one floor lamp and one table lamp that each boasted one (CFL) bulb, I said, “You know, we need one of those floor lamps with multiple bulbs that was in everyone’s grandma’s living room.”

A few days later, we walked over to our local antique shop and there it was! $29 with a note: “It works!”

The next day, I brought it home, thinking I would pop a CFL flood light in the top fixture, get some CFL candelabra bulbs for the side lamps and voila.

Well … not quite that easy.

The top bulb, it turns out, is a “mogul” bulb (and thus, these are called “mogul lamps”) — something I’d never heard of. It’s a bulb with a larger than standard base in a porcelain fixture to accommodate ferocious wattage.

I can tell you a 300-watt bulb ain’t entering my house, so I bought an adaptor on eBay to fit my standard-base 16-watt CFL bulb. With the adaptor you lose the three-way capability, which is OK with us. If we decide later we must have it, we can remove the adaptor. While I was at the eBay shop, I ordered three new “sleeves” for the side lamps to replace the grimy tan cardboard sleeves.

As for the side lamps, notice anything in that photo? That’s right, I have three different bulbs. Here’s why.

1. I went to Home Depot, purported to be a big supplier of CFL bulbs, but they had no low-energy candelabra bulbs. Lowe’s did, and I bought two packages (4 bulbs). They have small bases but screw into a converter. Alas, on one of them, the base broke, and another bulb did not work. (Back they will go to Lowe’s when I’m in the neighborhood.) Only one of the side lamps lights up with the candelabra bulb in it. On the other lamps, the candelabra bulb stays stubbornly dark.
2. One of the side lamps will not light if it has a CFL bulb in it. It has an incandescent bulb as a concession.
3. The other side lamp won’t light with a candelabra bulb, but will permit me to use a twisty CFL.

Fortunately, Mr. Cheap had suggested a lamp shade to cover the side lamps and globe. Once the three-light-bulb thing occurred, I agreed. After a false start with a shade from Lamps Plus that didn’t look right, Lowe’s had just the thing.

It took me a couple of weeks and a bunch of hassle (but not as much hassle as if we’d had to rewire the lamp, which I really expected we might have to do). Now we have a classy ol’ recycled floor lamp — that gives us good light and sucks up relatively little electricity — for a total price of about $95. (Last week, a couple of these lamps were listed on eBay for $175 to $250 each.)

This experience is a lesson in why the “green” movement is not necessarily permeating all levels of society, however. I didn’t tally how much time I spent running around trying to re-use a lamp instead of just buying a 300-watt halogen torchiere, but it was a lot. It involved two trips to Lamps Plus, one to Home Depot, one to Lowe’s, another pending trip to Lowe’s to return the non-working bulbs, and an online purchase (and three-day wait) for the bulb converter, plus the original purchase and a willingness to possibly rewire the lamp if necessary, not to mention the time to figure out the bulb situation. All to re-use something old instead of getting something new; all to save energy and resources (not my own, obviously) rather than just plugging in a three-way mogul bulb and three incandescent bulbs and being good to go.

For me, it’s worth it. But most likely, things will have to get a lot easier to make it worthwhile for more people to dive in. The Internet is a good start.

Now that’s a lightbulb moment. Or three.

Weekly Wrap-Up: Green film, green poo, Greenpa

Think Green, Live Green challenge: I’m no filmmaker, but if you’re handy with the videocam, here’s a chance to put your green life in action: http://verdavivo.wordpress.com/2008/01/18/think-green-live-green-challenge-2/

 

And you thought not using toilet paper was radical! Ha ha ha ha ha … Check out Greenpa’s “poopsicle” post for a really green bathroom routine: http://littlebloginthebigwoods.blogspot.com/2008/01/sigh-mel-brooks-found-out-too.html

In with the butter, out with the butter tubs

We don’t eat a lot of butter or spread around our house, but we do eat some. Butter comes out of the refrigerator too hard to spread, and spread (which is arguably healthier for your heart) comes in tubs.

Some of the few plastic items we can’t recycle at our municipal recycling are yogurt tubs … and spread tubs.

I’ve mostly done away with the yogurt tubs by making our own yogurt (or skipping it because I like fruit in it, and it’s winter, so we don’t have a lot of fruit).

To do away with the spread tubs, I dug deep into the back of my china closet and pulled out our old butter bell. (I like how our version is the spokesmodel on the official site! No longer true.) You can buy one from these guys, or you can often find similar models at pottery shows or kitchen shops — the company trademarked the name, but it’s an old idea.

Anyway, you soften a stick of butter and pack it into the lid of the butter bell. Then you put cool water in the base, and when you flip the lid over, the water seals out air and germs and keeps the butter cool, but soft enough to spread.

Butter doesn’t go bad very fast — fat is a preservative when it is kept clean, and in a kitchen like mine, which averages about 58 degrees in the winter, it should stay good for a while. If you sense a problem, you can confirm any baddies in the butter with an “off” or rancid taste or, of course, that telltale pink dairy-product mold. (And then, obviously, don’t eat it.)

Meanwhile, bell it and enjoy it.

Updated Sept. 2, 2008, to correct link information.

Pulling a fast one on phone books

I don’t know about you, but I use phone books.

Well, sometimes.

In fact, I used three this weekend. One to stand on while I did calf raises when I was too lazy to go to the gym, yet wanted to work out — the big fat book is good for that. And I used two of the skinnier ones to boost the lid of a chest we were re-doing while I screwed hinges into the main body of the chest.

To look up phone numbers? Not so much. In fact … no, I can’t remember the last time I looked up a number in a telephone book.

Yet the phone company insists on delivering phone books to my home. Not just one company; at least three companies. Not just one phone book, but two or three at a time. And now they slap a bunch of magnetized plastic advertisements on the front and inside, to make it even harder to recycle the books.

So last week, when Schnauzer Cheap started going crazy, I looked out the window and spotted the phone book delivery guy, parked right in front of our house. He put the books in plastic bags and then carried a few bags at a time to houses on the block. When I looked out, he had just dumped our bag at the door. By the time I unlocked the door, he was leaving our neighbor’s and heading on down the block.

I slipped outside, picked up the bag, and headed down the sidewalk, with the plausible excuse of bringing in the emptied recycling bin. I detoured to his car, dropped my bag back into the open hatch of his car, scurried over to the recycling bin and sauntered back up to my property.

One small victory for using fewer resources.

I peeked out to see if he noticed anything when he got back to his car, but he just shut the hatch lid with no visible change in affect, and then he drove away.

I know it’s not a permanent solution, but it was kind of fun.

p.s. If you are really a good citizen and you don’t need phone books, call the phone company to opt out. You’ll help prevent unneeded books from even being printed — and maybe save some gas in the delivery vehicle, too — if your opt-out succeeds, although this story from a year ago indicates you might not get lucky.

Whole Foods gives plastic bags the boot

All right, I seldom can afford to do much shopping there (and the one closest to me is often too crowded to maintain the tranquil anti-grocery atmosphere that makes organic groceries so pleasant), but Whole Foods is doing something amazing: Eliminating plastic bags from its checkout lines by Earth Day, April 22.

That’s right, three more months to stock up on your beige Whole Foods sacks.

They say they’ll eliminate 100 million plastic bags through the end of the year.

Read all about it: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2008-01-21-whole-foods-bags_N.htm

Add it up: What living green saved us in 2007

Putting effort into conserving makes a BIG difference. Here’s how things added up for our family of three from our biggest ways of living green in 2007:

1. Hung laundry out to dry, spring through fall (October/November). In seven months, about 140 loads of laundry (conservatively) saved $69 and 630,000 watts of electricity.
2. Composted all vegetable waste. Two to three half-gallon(ish) bins move out of our kitchen every week, turning about 130 pounds of stink-producing waste into fertilizer.
3. Brought my own shopping bags to all the stores where I shopped. At a per-month average savings of 43.6 plastic bags, I refused approximately 523 bags in one year.
4. Switched just about all our light bulbs to CFLs — 23 light bulbs. If we save an average of 46 watts per hour (replacing a 60-watt bulb with a 14-watt bulb), and use the average bulb just 1 hour per day, we’ll save 386,170 watts and $41 in a year.
5. Lowered the thermostat at night (to 55 degrees, then a compromise at 58 degrees). Our gas company claims lowering the thermostat by one degree saves 1% on your bill, which would come to 2% off our bill (our new “low” is 2 degrees lower than previously), or $2.40 a month. I don’t know if that’s correct, but our last 2007 gas bill was 8% lower than our last 2006 gas bill.
6. Donated 26 bags of goods (375 pounds) to charity for re-use, Freecycled 184 pounds and sold 150 pounds (last half of 2007 only) — 709 pounds of items that might go into the landfill from some homes.
7. Recycled our paper, plastic, glass and cardboard in city bins — a total of about 21 large carts full, or at least 315 pounds (15 pounds per full cart).
8. Switched to natural cleaning products – especially baking soda.
9. Saved water by flushing less and catching “warm-up” water to re-use for watering plants, cooking pasta, the dog’s bowl, etc.
10. Recycled plastic bags we do receive.
11. Recycled shipping materials (packing peanuts, etc.) by taking them to our local shipping store for re-use (two huge garbage bags full).

You don’t have to get all obsessive with a spreadsheet like I do. But this week, take a look at your own house and think about how the little things add up.

Water chart & water-saving wish list

OK! Are You Going to Be This Way the Rest of the Time I Know You? not only likes to conserve water, too, she also is more talented than I and converted my water use chart into a jpeg for me.

Voila, the illustration of our water use the last few years! (We are billed bimonthly, thus six bills per year.)

Note that the spike corresponds with Denver Water’s suggested outdoor watering schedule, posted in 2006.

And my husband pointed out that rain barrels (as well as using grey water … but not unused water) are illegal in Denver.

In the kitchen this morning, I wished for another invention — a “tiny tap” that would open a tap just a smidge, if you need a few drops of water or if you need to rinse some little tiny thing, when you don’t need the faucet at full force.

What water-savers would you invent, given your druthers?

Saving water

No weekly wrap-up, so this will have to do.

The other day I came across this excellent post about ways to save water in your home.

We have implemented most of these ideas, although I really wish we had an on-demand/tankless hot water heater. It drives me crazy when I turn off my shower (especially when it’s at night, just before bed … ergo, no one will need any hot water for at least 8 hours) and hear the water heater click on. However, our budget doesn’t currently allow for a new water heater, especially when our current one is a high-efficiency standard tank heater that’s just three years old (and for that matter, we replaced a “shorty” water heater at a cost of more than $1,000 at our old house a couple of years before we moved).

I’m intrigued by the idea of the recirculating water pump on some of our plumbing, like the kitchen sink, which takes forever to get hot; or the bathroom sink, which inexplicably takes a minute or more to get hot water, while the shower right next to it is hot instantly. But at $200 each, this isn’t in our near future.

We’ve been working hard to reduce our water use. (I wanted to post my spreadsheet, but I can’t get it to post — it’s a PDF. Sorry, nerds. 🙂

Our overall success has been hard to gauge. Our annual water usage the last three years has been:

• 52,000 gallons in 2005
• 71,000 gallons in 2006
• 62,000 gallons in 2007

However, in mid-2005 we moved to a new house with a MUCH bigger yard (same size lot — about 6,000 square feet — but our new house has a garage with a smaller footprint, no alley, and a house with a 600-square-foot-smaller footprint). And at our new house, we’ve been doing a lot more gardening. Summer yard/garden watering accounts for a lot of our water use — there’s a big spike in the summer. 2006 also had a spring spike, but it didn’t recur this year.

I’ve seen statistics that say the average U.S. household uses 300 gallons of water a day. That would be nearly 110,000 gallons a year. So, in 2007, we used 57 percent of that average. I can tell my efforts are making a difference when I am in a public restroom with Little Cheap and she turns the tap off while she lathers up her hands, then turns it back on to rinse.

We have a few things still to do:

1. We do have grass in the front yard (sad, patchy, brownish grass, because we don’t water that much and we’re in high-altitude, parched Colorado). One of our upcoming garden projects is to chip away at that grass and xeriscape one side of our yard. Mr. Cheap already converted half of the other side of the yard.
2. I’d like to install rain barrels to collect roof runoff for lawn-watering. This site says you can capture 625 gallons of water from a 1,000-square-foot roof for every 1″ of rain — and they even sell barrels that are repurposed from used food-shipping barrels. If you do this, keep barrels tightly covered to protect children and animals, and do not use untreated water for anything but watering plants you do not eat (because of who-knows-what coming off your shingles).
3. This raingutter diverter looks pretty great for sending rainwater to water your whole lawn. I guess the downsides are that you would have to keep it set up all the time in case it rains, it wouldn’t be much help when it was dry in between rains, and it’s fairly pricey. I think it would be great to channel water from the one fluffy patch of grass at one corner of our house (or a xeriscaped area) into the dry area between our house and our neighbor’s, where I’d like to install raspberry bushes. Of course, in a drought-stricken region, this is assuming it rains at all.
4. And then there’s the toilet-top automatic sink. This has four drawbacks: Having to wash your hands in frigid water, having another surface to clean in the bathroom, the price, and the fact that it only works when you flush … although carefully let it mellow/flush it down planning could eliminate some of that last one.

Have you implemented any of these changes? If so, tell us how they work!