“What will be your environmental story for 2012?”

Bullfrog Power, a green energy supplier, asked that question of its customers last month, and they answered in droves: from individuals to huge companies like Walmart; from non-profits to large municipalities; and more.

And what kinds of things are they pledging?

• “To reduce household trash to one bag per person per year”
• “To join a co-operative, to buy used goods and to ‘free-cycle’ what I don’t need”
• “To buy carbon offsets for all our air travel” (from a musical group)
• “To eliminate single-use boxes on most orders and save 76,000 boxes”
• “To be 100% supplied by renewable energy, and a zero-waste company” (from Walmart!!)

That’s just the start.  Read more – and be inspired, as I was – at Bullfrog’s website.  Then plan your 2012 environmental story!

Try to use less pish-pish

… I mean windshield washer fluid

Tis the season of pish-pish.  (That’s my wife’s nickname for windshield washer fluid.)  On cool winter days when busy roads are wet with slush, we use the stuff almost constantly as we drive.

Most windshield washer fluids contain methyl alcohol.  The good news is that it biodegrades quickly in the soil or evaporates readily in the air.  The bad news about methyl alcohol is:

• Most of it is produced synthetically from – you guessed it – fossil fuels
• In its raw form, it is both poisonous and flammable (and windshield washer jugs have ‘Danger’ logos as evidence of that)
• Once evaporated, it contributes to the formation of smog
• We release SO MUCH of it across North America – imagine the millions and millions of litres every winter

What to do?

• Look for windshield washer that is made from plant-based ethanol (though it too has its issues)
• If possible, increase the distance between yourself and the vehicle ahead of you to minimize spray; drive in the driest part of your lane to reduce the spray you generate for the vehicle behind you; and avoid rush hour traffic if that’s an option.  As well, strive to use only the amount of fluid you need each time you wash the windshield.  But please use good judgement, and NEVER compromise road safety!!

One guiding thought for 2012

A couple of years ago, I completed an on-line quiz about my footprint on the planet.  It asked questions about how I live – house, vehicle, driving, food, waste and more – and then calculated how much land it takes to sustain my lifestyle.  I was shocked when it told me that if everyone on the planet lived like me, we’d need four planets.  I’ve worked really hard since then to reduce my footprint – but more recently I discovered that that ratio applies to all Canadians: if everyone on the planet lived like us, we’d need four planets.

Of course, there is only one: this fragile, beautiful, precious and irreplaceable planet.

So perhaps the best New Years resolution any of us can make is this: to strive to use less of everything, in whatever way we can.

Make memories, not garbage, this Christmas

A trash-free holiday

For most of us, Christmas is a wonderful time for family, friends and gifting.  But unfortunately, there’s also a downside to Christmas: junk that’s often in the landfill by Easter, and the biggest pickup day of the year for the trash man.  So this year, why not give the trash man – and your planet – a break?

The Clean Bin Project is a wonderful initiative by three young Canadians to try to produce zero trash for a year. Their website has many litterless gift ideas for the holidays, such as:

• Tickets to a theatre, music performance or movie
• Passes to a gym or museum
• Classes
• Outdoor experiences such as snowshoeing or horseback riding
• Massages or other health and wellness experiences
• House cleaning services
• Homemade consumables
• Secondhand items

Read more great ideas here, to help you create more memories and less garbage this Christmas.

Light up your night without running up your bill

Nightlights that use virtually no power

If you like having a little bit of light in your home at night, you can save by switching to electroluminescent nightlights.

Typical nightlight bulbs use 4 or 7 watts.  That’s not a lot – but they’re often on for long periods of time, and many homes have more than one.

Electroluminescent nightlights, like the one shown, are incredibly efficient: plugged in 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, they use just two cents worth of power.  Yep, two cents a year, or about 99.5% savings over a 7 watt bulb.

They do provide a bit less intensity and a different glow than standard nightlights – but the savings are worth it.  Ask for them at your local hardware store.  (Mine have a lifetime warranty, and were purchased here.)

Measure, then manage – and save!

A portable power meter can save you energy and money

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” goes the expression.  It applies to electricity too, where our only indication of consumption is the monthly bill we get.  But by then, it’s too late to do anything about it.  As well, power bills tell us nothing about what’s running up our bill – so we have no way to distinguish the power hogs in our homes and workplaces from the power misers.

Portable power meters to the rescue!  They’re simple devices that provide a real-time readout of the power consumption of anything that plugs into an outlet.  Once you know how much power is consumed by the different things in your home or workplace, you can zero in on actions that will make the biggest difference in your power usage – and bill.

Portable meters like this one, this one or this one (a bit more expensive, but very good and easy to use) are available for loan at many public libraries, or at many hardware stores.

This is not hot air

Take a pass on Helium-filled balloons

Helium balloons have become part of birthdays, weddings and carnivals because they’re fun.  But maybe we need to rethink them.

Here’s why: Helium is a very limited resource.  We get it from within the earth – but there’s only so much on our planet, and once it’s lost to the atmosphere, it’s impossible to recover or recycle.  Helium is vital to many industrial and medicinal uses, like welding, fibre optics and the MRI machines used in hospitals everywhere.  At our current rate of Helium use, however, shortages can be expected in 25-30 years.  Yikes!

Given that reality, conservation seems a wise strategy.  Most people would agree that MRI machines are probably more important than party balloons.  So perhaps we should collectively reserve our limited supply of Helium for the most important uses, and take a pass on frivolous uses like party balloons.

(Click here for more information on the coming shortage of Helium.)

Don’t egg the planet this October 31

An eco-friendly Halloween

Halloween is a much-awaited highlight for kids everywhere: a chance to dress up, spook the neighbours and get tons of tasty loot!  But Halloween has a pretty big carbon footprint, and that’s a bit like egging your mother’s house: not nice.

Here are five tips to make your Halloween celebrations a little greener:

• The single most important thing you can do: leave the car home, and have trick-or-treaters walk (escorted if necessary) around the neighbourhood
• Use stuff you already have, plus a bit of imagination, to create your costume.  It saves money and results in less trash.  Everybody should have a ‘tickle trunk’ like Mr. Dressup had!
• Don’t distribute junk food or cheap low-quality treats from questionable distant origins.  Strive to give away treats that are healthy and nutritious, as well as good tasting.  (A challenge, I know – I clearly remember not being impressed with apples in my treat bag when I was a kid!)
• If you want to be a real eco-hero, look for fair trade chocolate.  Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Minis qualify, and you can find other brands here.
• Be sure to compost your pumpkin when it starts to melt away!

Not jugs or cartons, but…

Buy your milk in bags

Milk is a staple of virtually every household, but what type of milk packaging is the most eco-friendly?  All three types of milk packaging – jugs, cartons and bags – are recyclable.  But unfortunately not all are accepted by all recycling programs.

As well, recycling isn’t a perfect solution: collecting and transporting recyclables costs time, money and fuel – especially when the end destination of those recyclables is half a world away.  Where I live, jugs and cartons are recycled, but in China.  Yep – sorted, baled, stuffed into a container and shipped thousands of kilometres.

So what’s a consumer’s greenest option for milk packaging?

1. Check with your local solid waste authority to see what’s accepted for recycling, and then choose accordingly.  In spite of its shortcomings, recycling is still better than trashing.

2. Choose the biggest size available; one big jug or carton uses less material than two or more small ones.

3. If all three types of packaging are recycled where you live, choose plastic bags:

• they are lighter (less material and less weight to transport)
• both the outer and inner bags are the same soft plastic as grocery bags so they can be mixed in with them (but inner bags must be well rinsed of residual milk)
• they may be recycled locally (as they are here in NB) as opposed to being shipped to China; and
• soft plastics (#4 LDPE) are one of those rare materials that can be perfectly recycled: that is, reprocessed back into the very same types of products over and over again.

Save on printer ink

Make “draft” quality your default

Ounce for ounce, few things are more expensive than ink for the inkjet printers many of us own and use.  I recall reading a few years ago that manufacturers make more money through ink sales than printer sales!

There’s an easy way to make your printer’s ink cartridges last longer: simply change your printer’s default setting to the DRAFT (or fastest printing) mode.  That setting uses the least ink but still yields a print quality adequate for most everyday uses.  Also, choose greyscale printing over color printing when possible.

In both cases, you’ll save money, save ink and produce fewer empty printer cartridges (yes, they can be recycled, but less is always best).