Summer

The best time of the year. Or the worst. Depending on your point of view.

If you are a normal citizen of the world ( and by normal I mean someone who thrives in nice weather rather than freezing cold or rain) then summer is probably the time you really look forward to. There's a reason most of the al fresco social events of the year take place in the summer - weddings, BBQ's, cricket games, country fares, agricultural shows etc. They are very much dependant on the weather.
But lately this hasn't really been the case. In one summer we have seen some of the extremes of weather that really make us question the concept of summer vs winter. In the US there has been a sustained heat wave over most of the Midwest. Crops have failed and record temperatures have been recorded. In the UK the summer has ranked as one of the worst on record. Temperatures have been low, and rainfall has been much, much higher, than normal with record rainfalls of as much as one moths rain in a single day. This has extend pretty much across May, June and July.

More recently there has been a report of record rainfall in Manila which as turned the city into a disaster area. News reports of people swimming down the main streets have appeared on the nightly bulletins.
As I sit here in my garden, under a parasol watching the sun set at the end of a scorching hot August day, I can't help but feel that this kind of weather is much more preferable to the cooler, wet weather we have been subjected to for the last two or three months. But at the same time I also know that the concept of seasons as we know them is starting to change - particularly in England. This year, for example, we had a march which was memorable for being one of the warmest on record. Everyone was taking this to be a sign of warm weather to come and a great summer. This was dashed when April came round and brought with it torrential rain and floods. This was followed by a wet May and a June that the weather forecasters actually wrote off as a summer month. The Queen's Diamond Jubilee weekend was almost a washout. July was fractionally better.

But since the start of the Olympics we have had what can only be described as a good summer. The weather has been warm and sunny and the amount of rain has been light and sporadic.
Naturally everyone is euphoric that summer has finally come and - providing this warm weather lasts until the start of September - we will go around patting ourselves on the back about what a good summer it finally turned out to be.

But then we have the winter to look forward to.

Traditionally the winter should be mild. Snow may fall, but shouldn't be too bad and shouldn't last too long. This isn't Buffalo, New York where the Lake Effect causes heavy snowfalls across great periods of the winter months. Nor is it Green Bay where the temperature will drop off the bottom of the thermometer and stop everything growing for weeks on end. This is England where a particularly heavy snowfall can result in history books being rewritten and people reminiscing about "The big fall of '47".

So, naturally, when we had some particularly bad winter weather over the last couple of years people started to wonder what is happening. Our summers are shorter and wetter, our winters are longer and colder. Is it the end of days?

So what does this mean? Are we in the midst of climate change? Is the end of the world nigh? Well yes and no.

I think that even those who are the most climate sceptical would concede that what is happening is not following a normal pattern. They would have to admit that there are weather events which are not expected and which must point to something being different.

They may not agree that this is coming from man-made causes. They may believe that it is a result of a natural cycle of the planet. But science has proven time and time again that we are throwing things into the atmosphere that cannot be good for the planet. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air is rising and the amount of plants and trees that can use this and convert it back to oxygen is falling. This is simply unsustainable.

What are we to do about it? Well. The fact of the matter is that you, my reader, can't do a single thing about it. You are just one person. You are just an individual with little impact and influence on the fate of a planet.

But the fact also exists that everyone on the planet is an individual with little impact and influence on its fate. But if everyone did something, then these six billion inhabitants of planet earth must be able to make a minor difference. Maybe even a major difference.

That's why I encourage you all to look at what you do on a daily basis and try to be a little more ecologically minded about it. Here's a short lists of things you could do.

• Walk to the shops rather than drive.
• Ride your bike more (the exercise will be a benefit too)
• If you must drive, practice hypermiling
• Get a more economical car. Preferably get an electric car. (Sure, they need electricity which can come from burning fossil fuels, but it can also come from non fossil fuels and the electric engine is more efficient than the petrol engine at using that energy)
• Turn your thermostat down a couple degrees in winter and stick a jumper on instead.
• Recycle as much as you can. I throw out more in my recycle bin than in my regular bin. I also compost where possible.

There are many other things you can do to become more environmentally aware. Some of them are easy. Others are harder and require a mindset change that will not come easy to certain people. (Would you give up flying on airlines and start taking your vacation somewhere that you could get to by coach or train?), but these things were never meante to be easy.

It's the future of the planet and our children. If it were easy we would be doing it already.

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On electric cars and environmental impact

On my Facebook page there is an interesting discussion going on between a couple of us around the subject of Electric Vehicles (EV's). This was triggered by an article on the BBC about a man trying to drive his electric mini from London to Edinburgh using just publicly available charge points.

To put this into context, the UK has seen a gently increase in the number of electric powered vehicles on their roads. The latest - and Car Of The Year Award winner for 2010 - is the Nissan Leaf. This is a nice, spacious family car run entirely on batteries and costing upwards of £29,000 (before taking into account the government's £5000 subsidy). But they are stymied by the fact that they can't run as far as petrol cars between top-ups and there aren't as many top-up places available.

The discussion is really coming down to two issues (which are somewhat related):

1) The range of these cars.

2) The environmental impact of them.

For the first issue the problem appears to be that the designers of the vehicle have included ALL the electrical items on the cars and linked them into a single power source. A battery might last long enough to give you a range of about 100 miles if you don't use anything else on the car. But as soon as you turn the lights on, or the radio, or the air conditioning, the windscreen wipers or anything that sucks electricity from the battery you are reducing the range of the vehicle. This means - to all intents and purposes - that you can realistically expect to get about 60 miles on one charge (depending on speed, acceleration and other variables). This is leading to something know as 'range anxiety' for potential electric car drivers. I know, for example, that when my car hits the red bar on the fuel tank I can drive conservatively for about 25 miles and still get home. But if I'm at the same stage in an electric car the range could depend on whether it's raining and dark, or if it's sunny and hot. In each case I will be using something that will increase the electrical usage and decrease the range.

Environmentally electric cars look like a no-brainer. They don't use oil and they are better for the environment. But as a friend of mine pointed out in the discussion there are a couple of mitigating factors. Electricity still needs to be generated to fill the cars. This currently comes mostly from fossil fuels and is therefore unsustainable and environmentally damaging. But furthermore the batteries in cars are made from lithium which is another unsustainable resource. With the demand for lithium increasing due to electric cars, cell phones, computers etc both the cost and the availability is going to increase dramatically.

So what can we do?

Well as my friend Peter quite rightly said 'I don't have the answer. If I did I would be a billionaire'. But I think there are a couple of things here that need to be looked at seriously

Firstly the source of the electricity. I believe that creating 100 miles worth of electricity for a car uses less fossil fuel than running 100 miles in a oil-based fuel vehicle. This is - at least - commendable. But it can't stop there. We have to be looking at much better, more efficient and cheaper sources of fuel. Hydrogen fuel cells are one possibility and Honda already have a working model on the market, the FCX Clarity. The other is to look at completely different sources of energy to create our electricity. Wave power, hydroelectric, solar and wind all come to mind. Whilst these will not replace out current electrical generation needs completely, they could produce that proportion of the electricity needed for electric vehicles thereby reducing the pollution and fossil fuel impact of cars. Nuclear power is also something to be seriously considered.

Secondly we need to be looking at the materials being used to make batteries. Lithium is currently the go-to element, but there are other more efficient (but more expensive) materials out there. Zinc-Air, Molten Salt, and Zinc Bromine. Again these are finite resources but recycling is in place to allow the key elements from these batteries to be used again.

But what is the key issue? Is it an environmental thing? For some people it is. For some people the desire the help the earth is paramount and they are willing to do whatever they can to facilitate this. For others it's a financial issue. They see the high cost of EV's and realise they can spend a lot less and get something cheaper but just as good for them AND they don't have to stop every couple of hours and recharge for half a day. But for others money isn't the issue. If the government gave everyone an electric car they would still not use it. Because it is change. And people don't like change. They don't like having to think about their journey in stages of 60 -100 mile chunks with recharges at the end of each chunk. They don't like having to sit and wait for 2 - 6 hours for their battery to recharge. They don't like having to  go out of their way to find some of the few public charging stations available in England.

But then again few people liked having the little man with the red flag prevented from walking in front of their car back at the turn of the last century.

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Random Musings on life 'n stuff

Occasionally things occur to me that I have to write down:

• Why is it if I throw a kitten into boiling water I am an animal abuser but if I throw a lobster into boiling water I am a chef?
• Maggots are said to be good to put into a wound because they only eat dead tissue. How do they know it's dead? Maybe if they bite and nibble at live tissue for a while it 'becomes' dead. You could lose an arm that way.
• If we descended from the apes, how come there are still apes on the planet? Crocodiles descended from the dinosaurs, apparently, yet the dinosaurs disappeared.
• What is all this commotion about X-Factor? So what if someone got voted off? So what if it's talentless twins remaining? IT'S JUST A TV SHOW. Get over it, folks.
• Who can we believe about Global Warming? Is it really getting warmer? Feels pretty cold outside at the moment. Is it right that global warming can resulting the planet getting cooler?
• If we do need movement on the global warming front, surely the best way to do this is to make it financially attractive for businesses to adhere to set standards. Reward adherance to standards, penalise non-compliance. It works every time. 
• PC vs Mac. Who really cares? iPhone vs Android. Who really cares? Friendfeed vs Twitter. Who really cares? If that's all you've got to worry about then you're in a pretty good position in life.
• If we run out of fossil fuels, will this make us more dependent on non-fossil fuels, or will we go back to a world where we had less dependence on energy altogether? Will we completely stop flying, for example?
• Ugg boots. Are they the ugliest things ever for a woman to wear? 
• If the oil producing counties of the world run out of oil and some small island in the pacific discovers oil, will that island become a world superpower?
  

That's your lot for today.

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Greening up the film set

Image via Wikipedia

As regular readers will no doubt know, I have spent a lot of time recently on film sets. Whilst there I tend to do a couple things during my down time: I focus on the process issues that arise as a result of the slow and cumbersome way that films are made (and money wasted) nowadays and I look at wastage from an environmental point of view to determine what could be done differently.

Having spent a long time on film sets and around locations and production bases, I have identified a number of items that should be focused on by film companies. My hope is that a little bit of time focused on these items will save them both money and effort, but will have no detrimental effect on the quality of the films being made (regardless of whether you think that’s a good thing or not)

Let’s have a look at the current issues that arise with a production:

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On the British weather...

Picture courtesy of Athena's pix
Released under a Creative Commons Attribution license

It has to be said that the British are obsessed with the weather. Being a relatively small island (in the big scheme of things) our weather is both changeable and unpredictable. Therefore it is a frequent topic of conversation. The one thing that can be said about the British weather with a level of assurance is that it is 'mild'. We don't tend to have extremes of hot and cold like, say, some of the American midwest towns, but neither do we have levels of predictability for weather like, say, Australia.

The fact of the matter is that Britain is a mild, reasonably wet island attacked by weather from both continental Europe, Scandinavia and the Atlantic. The gulf stream which surrounds the westerly sides of the country warms the water sufficiently that we don't get weather so cold it freezes the water (Liverpool is on the same latitude as Goose Bay in Canada. They regularly freeze over, we never do) and generally makes out winters less severe than some of our European neighbours.

I worked with a mid-west born manager by the name of Steve a number of years ago. He was a good ol' boy from central Indiana. Born and bred there, he barely left the state. Whilst a lot of his opinions were very parochial and a little 'twee' he did say one thing which I kind of identified with. "You know, Gary," he said "I couldn't live in England because I like to be in a country where the seasons are different. I like a good winter followed by a nice summer".

The reason I brought this up is because we have been having a spell of warm weather here in England recently and it seems to be following the pattern dictated by the meteorologists. They stated that the summer would be 'Warm but with some heavy rain storms'. This contrasts with last summer which was 'Heavy rain but with some light sun bursts'. A summer like this is generally a two edged sword though. The nice weather means that outdoor events such as the ICC World Twenty-20 Cricket, Glastonbury, The Ashes and Wimbledon will not be rained off, whereas everyone in England knows that if we have more than 1 week of consecutive hot weather the water companies start warning about droughts and threatening to put us all on standpipes to get our water (It has happened many times, most noticeably in the "Great drought of '76" when people were almost reduced to drinking their own urine to survive¹). Britain even has an Emergency Drought Order which allows the water companies to cut supplies to houses and force the use of Standpipes.

Nevertheless I think we must all be thankful that the weather is looking to be a bit warmer here in Britain. Being of Irish extraction and thus fair skinned I, personally, will not be venturig out into the sun too often - bright red skin doesn't become me at all - but I dare say it will stop people talking about the weather we're having this summer and move them onto some other topic of conversation - such as "Will we have to pay for this nice summer with an awful winter?"

¹Of course people weren't reduced to drinking their own urine. This was an attempt at humour. Drinking your own urine is not recommended. Apparently.

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Starbucks Decaf Less Available in Afternoon

A site with the name Musings Cafe has to bring you the latest news from Starbucks:

From Bloomberg: Starbucks Corp., the world’s largest coffee chain, will stop continuously brewing decaffeinated coffee after noon as part of a drive to waste less and save $400 million by September.

The company, which last year started brewing fresh pots of coffee every 30 minutes, will have the caffeine-free version available upon request after 12 p.m., the Seattle-based company said today in an e-mailed statement. It takes about four minutes for a fresh cup to brew, spokeswoman Bridget Baker said.

“For many of our stores, the demand for decaf is greatly reduced in the afternoon,” the company said in the statement. “With our current standard of continually brewing decaf after 12 p.m. regardless of demand, we have seen a high amount of waste.”

So there you are. Apparently decaf coffee is not needed as much after lunch. Who would have thought that?

Actually looking at this from an efficiency point of view (Which is something the sister blog The Process Cafe does) this is a very good move. They are not removing decaf totally, just reducing waste through not brewing and disposing of coffee that isn't being sold.

In today's economic hard times this makes a lot of sense. It reduces waste, decreases cost and doesn't reduce customer satisfaction. Although you do have to ask the question of why they don't brew to demand for everything. I visit Costa coffee and Cafe Nero (both far superior to Starbucks) and when I ask for decaf it get's brewed on the spot instantly - but then again so does the non-decaf stuff. Maybe Starbucks need to look at that model instead?

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Woud you eat giraffe, or rat?

(This post is a follow on from a Posterous entry I made recently)

If people eat meat, should they be worried about what meat they are eating?

Obviously you should be worried about the quality of the meat your are eating - you don't want anything that is tainted or contains the source of CJD (mad cow disease in humans) - but should it really matter if you are eating cow, sheep, pig, crocodile, giraffe, dog, cat or rat? And if it does matter why does it matter?

Surely once the meat is killed (humanely hopefully) and cooked then there is no different to the end consumer regardless of what the meat is? A steak in a polystyrene container sealed with cling film could contain beef or horse, crocodile or ostrich. Why does it matter? You can, of course, decide that you don't like the taste of certain meats and not wish to eat based on that, but at the end of the day if you subscribe to the carnivore mentality then any meat should be fair game (pun intended)

Several years ago I worked with a Belgian guy who considered himself a bit of a gastronome. We travelled extensively for business and he would avail himself of many of the local delicacies at each location. A lot of the things he ate I wouldn't even look at and he saw this one day - as he shovelled a spoonful of small, whole fish into his mouth, eyes, tail and scales included - and said 'Gary, you eat with your eyes not with your mouth'.

I wonder how many people out there eat with their eyes not their mouths.

This came about because Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall - a UK gourmet chef and TV personality - was in Africa some years ago when he was offered (and accepted) giraffe meat at a meal. He found nothing wrong with doing so, but apparently conservationists were up in arms. In the piece Hugh defended his actions by saying that if it was a boar or an impala he had eaten nobody would have batted an eyelid. The fact that it was a beautiful, long-necked, spotted-coated giraffe made people more emotionally involved than they should have been.

On a recent episode of Long Way Down where Ewan 'Obi-Wan' McGregor and director John Boorman's son Charlie were motorbiking from the top of England to the bottom of Africa they spent the night in Rawanda. Their guide brought a live goat with them and it was slaughtered, butchered and cooked by the machete wielding guide and eaten by the cast and crew. The looks on the faces of Charlie and Ewan (and no doubt some of the crew) was priceless as it suddenly occured to them where their food was coming from. (Incidentally they were also shocked that Rawanda was the scene of such barbaric machete based massacres, but didn't put two and two together...)

At this point it should be pointed out that I am a vegetarian and have been for more than half my life. I don't eat anything that ever had a mother. Having said that I don't have a problem with anyone else eating whatever they like (although I would encourage anyone to consider the benefits of a vegetarian diet). But I do feel that at the end of the day you either agree with eating meat or you don't. If you do then you should agree with eating any sort of meat. Beef, lamb, pork, chicken, horse, crocodile, ostrich, rat, dog, giraffe, cat etc. You may not like the taste of freshly chargrilled dog, but should you refuse to eat it because it is a dog? I think not.

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The high price of running a car.

Some of you will have seen my tweet recently about paying the yearly vehicle tax. (Here in the UK the government levies a tax on each vehicle which varies according to the age and green credentials of the vehicle. By paying the tax you end up with a small 'disc' that you display in the window. Not displaying one - or having an out of date one - is a traffic offence which can result in a fine and license endorsement). This year I had to pay £170 ($255) for the tax disc. Last year it was £165 ($247). That's a 3% hike - which is more or less par for the course with these things.

I think that's quite a lot. However it could be worse. If I drove, say, a car registered on or after 23/03/06 that had emmisions of over 225 g/km I would be paying £400 per year ($600). Remember that's just for the right to actually take a car onto a public road!

On top of that a car in the UK has to buy petrol (or diesel). Even with the price of oil dropping as it has done recently they price of fuel is still around $5 per gallon (Based on a UK gallon of 4.54 litres rather than the US gallon of 3.6). An average UK car will return around 30 miles per gallon and will drive 12000 miles in a year. This equates to a fuel cost of $2000 in petrol alone. At the height of the oil price hikes last year that price would have risen to $3300. Add to that the cost of repairing the car, changing oil & tyres and wear & tear and the cost can be quite astronomical. This doesn't even include the the actual cost of buying the car (or funding the purchase through a loan)

Is the government trying to influence us to stop driving? If so, what is the alternative? British public transport has suffered from a steep decline in funding. The services are atrocious. If I wanted to visit my parents by train, for example, I would have to take at least three trains with a duration of up to 6.5 hours for a cost of £90.70 ($136) over a weekend. The trains run at inconvenient times and I would have to spend most of the Friday and Sunday on route.

The coaches are not much better. The coach journey takes between 8.5 and 12 hours and involves a change with a wait in the coach station of at between 40 minutes and two hours, The times are inconvenient (departing at 5.45 in the morning and arriving back at 1 o'clock in the morning), and the fare is between £44 ($66) and £51 ($76).

In the car I can do the journey door to door in 3.5 hours for a fuel cost of less than £51 ($76) and leave and return when I want.

What's wrong with this picture?

If you're not following me on twitter and want to then click here.
(Originally posted at Gaz4695's Posterous account. Image courtesy of VirtualErn. Released under a creative commons attribution license)

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Hypermiling

Hypermiling is a term used to describe the practice of driving in such a way as to increase the fuel economy of one's vehicle. You know that I am a bit of an environmentalist at heart so I wanted to draw your attention to a hypermiling article I came across today


The article is on the WikiHow pages and it contains many useful hints.

I would suggest you head over there to have a quick look at it, but before you do here are a couple of nuggets that I came across while browsing:

• It's possible to improve fuel economy by 37% just by changing the way you
  drive
• If you have a choice between various routes, go for the one with
  the least number of stops; country roads are good because you don't
  have to stop (and go) as much and you don't have to accelerate/brake to get on/off (like with the highway).
• Instead of searching for the perfect spot close to an entrance (which will involve stop and go driving, especially with pedestrians involved and other drivers pulling in or out of their spots) pull into a spot that's further away from the entrance.

There are some great tips here and I hope you take them all to heart.

Props to the Wikihow for this article

Find it here

Drive safely (and economically)

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Environmental madness in the news

Back at the start of this year I wrote a series of articles about ways to become more environmentally friendly.

7 Tips to Environmental Goodness: In this article I wrote about 7 quick things you can do NOW to do your bit to protect the environment

7 More tips to Environmental Goodness was a contination article where I explained some of the things you can purchase as replacements for existing items and be more environmentally friendly at the same time, and finally in

7 Final tips to Environmental Friendliness I explained the key lifestyle changes needed to help the planet


Things have been a little quiet since then. Until recently.

Over the last few days there have been an enormous number of articles with environmental themes.

For example:

1. Businesspundit has a list of the top 25 big companies that are going green
2. Youngentrepreneur.com has a list of tips to save your energy costs
3. The New Scientist reckons that Americans must diet to save their environment. It also says that unsustainable development is putting humanity at risk
4. The Apple Blog talks about Flipswap - a service that takes your old phones, pays you for it and sends it to a third world country where it will be reused
5. And in Monte Carlo the Ecological Vehicles and Renewable Energies show demonstrated the current eco-friendly cars that japan and the US are producing.

But by far the one that caught my eye most was from the UK consumers association ('Which?'), that was focused on the bottled water craze.

In the UK the bottled water market is worth £1.68b ($3.2b).

The bottled water production process wastes an estimated 2 gallons of water for every gallon purified to put into a bottle.

Some bottled waters also come from as far away as New Zealand, and most plastic water bottles go to landfill where they could take up to 450 years to decompose.

And to make things even more eye-opening: in a recent Which? survey half of the over 3000 people surveyed could find no difference between bottled water and normal tap water. That is incredible.

Personally I don't drink bottled water. I don't like the taste of the local tap water where I live (I am in a region with 'hard water') so I pass it through a Brita water filter system. The cost to me is somewhere around 3p per litre. Compare that with bottled water from 'own brand' supermarkets (8.5p per litre), Evian bottled water (31p per litre), SEI bottled water at Selfridges (£5.58 per litre) and Claridges most expensive bottled water (£30 per litre) and you can see that the savings are amazing.

Quick water tip: Keep a jug of tap water in the fridge. This cools the water and acts to de-chlorinate it which helps taste. Replace the water every 24 hours.

On a water related issue, BusinessPundit have a great article talking about the myth of freely flowing tap water and how we all, still, need to do our bit for the environment.

So how's the water in your area? What are you doing to help the environment?

Technorati Tags: environment, eco

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Read on a packet of potato chips.

You all know that I am trying to be eco-minded in the things I do. I've even written a series of posts on that very topic.

So I was amused to read the following label written on the side of a packet of Kettle Chips today. I was looking for a symbol to see if I could recycle the packaging and, down at the bottom of the label, in small writing, were the words :

"This package is unfortunately not recyclable yet"

Let's think about this shall we. The company has gone to the trouble of identifying that their packaging cannot go through any recognised recycling process and chose to write that on the side of the packet. But more than that, they've decided to write it in an ambiguous way. The use of the word "yet" at the end is meant to indicate, I am sure, that the company is working on developing packaging that can be recycled (like, say the original Smiths Crisps of years ago...?). But instead the language indicates that if I keep the package long enough, a point will be reached at which it will be able to be recycled.

Presumably they are awaiting some sort of technical innovation that will enable foil lined paper to be recycled?

However in the meantime I shan't be buying any more Kettle Chips.

(which is a shame because they're really, really tasty . . . .)

(c) 2008 Musings Cafe.

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7 Final Tips for environmental friendliness

This is the third, and last, in a series of posts about ways you can help the environment.

In the first post I discussed simple, free, things you could do today to change your habits and become more environmentally friendly.
In the second post I discussed purchases you could make when current things in your house need to be replaced.
Now I want to talk about the big things. The things that will cost you more, but which will make you very much more environmentally friendly.

1) Get a wood burning stove
A wood burning stove linked into your houses heating system is one of the cheapest and most efficient ways of heating water for warmth. Stoves come in all shapes and sizes and can be purchased from as little as £350 ($700). As with other forms of 'free' energy they need to be sized to the area they are providing energy for. A typical boiler stove would have a wood burning fire in the front providing 4Kw of heat to the room, 8.5kw to water and 12kw to central heating: enough to power 9 standard size single radiators. Remember with most stoves you need to use wood that has been dried for at least a year otherwise it will create deposits on the flue. In addition to that, the nature of wood burning stoves means that they do something known as a 'double burn' where they almost complete reduce all the atmospheric pollutants. So this is actually a very environmentally friendly way of burning.

2) Get solar panels
This is the one most people think about when it comes to making your house more environmentally friendly. Solar panels have been around for years now and they are more and more popular. Contrary to what you may imagine, you don't need to live in a place where there is year round sun to make these work although it does help if you're in a place where there is daylight for a chunk of the day (Northern Alaska, take note!). Solar panels work by transforming light energy into electrical energy through photo-voltaic cells. Put simply, they turn daylight into electricity. This electricity is free and non polluting and it can be used to power any electrical items you may have in your house.There are two main forms of solar cells in existence today, and these are; "solar electricity panels" and "solar hot water panels". The two different technologies allow us to either generate electricity for our homes or to heat the water we use.

3) Get a wind generator
We've all seen them, out in the middle of deserts, on top of hills (there's even a large one on the side of the motorway in Reading, England). Huge metal structures with blades rotating at various speeds harvesting the winds to make electricity. Not exactly the ideal thing to have in your yard or garden, right? Right!. However there are smaller domestic versions available with different ratings. A 2.5kw model could comfortably power a standard three bedroom house, a 6 kw model would be suitable for a 4-10 bed property while a 15 kw model could provide energy for up to six 3 bed properties. Many countries will provide funding to enable you to purchase your wind turbine. Of course turbines are not for everyone. if you live in an area with very low average wind speeds you will probably not benefit from one, and having a turbine directly on your roof or close to your house will lead to less than optimal usage of the wind (turbulence will reduce the effective power output), but if the conditions are right a wind turbine is a great thing to have.


4) Sell your surplus electricity back to the grid
The advantage of having your own electricity generation is that you can take any unused electricity and sell it back to the grid, this reducing the power consumption of oil burning power stations. The second advantage is that this will reduce your overall electricity bill by making you an energy supplier rather than consumer. This all sounds extremely well and good, but do bear in mind that at the moment - at least in the UK - the electricity suppliers will purchase your electricity at a rate which is considerably below the market rate they sell at. As more and more people move to this method of linking to the grid, the pricing paradigm will shift, but or now it's an income - but not a great one. Although it is better than nothing.....


5) Build an environmentally sound house from the ground up
This is the biggie! There are numerous examples of folks who have taken the plunge and designed a completely environmentally sound house. This includes identifying the optimal location, using recyclable materials, being completely self sufficient from an energy point of view etc. Some of the key points of this are: Zero-energy - houses are designed to use only energy from renewable sources. In addition to solar panels, tree waste can fuel a cogeneration plant (downdraft gasifier) to provide district heating and electricity. Energy efficient - build the house to face south to take advantage of solar gain, triple glaze it and ensure it has high thermal insulation. Water efficient - most rain water falling on the house should be collected and reused. Appliances can be chosen to be water efficient and use recycled water where possible. A "Living Machine" waste water recycling system can be installed. Low impact materials - building materials can be selected from renewable or recycled sources and located within a 35 mile radius of the site to minimize the energy required for transportation. Waste recycling - refuse collection facilities should be designed to support recycling. Doing all this is not, necessarily cheap (conservative estimates indicate something like a 5% premium over non eco-friendly items in the UK) but the savings in terms of daily running costs can be phenomenal. In one example, an architect built an eco-friendly house and was quoted as saying "... once he is living in the house (he expects it to be completed in October) the cost of heating the rooms should be about £50 a year — not bad when you consider that the house is 5,000 sq ft, arranged over three floors. His water costs are even lower, at £11, the cost of running the filtration system. Domestic hot water will cost a mere £15 a year."

6) Recycle your water
This can happen in one of two ways: "Rainwater Harvesting" which is typically defined as being water collected from roofs via traditional guttering, through down pipes to an underground tank(s). Delivered on demand by an in-tank submersible pump direct to toilets, washing machine and outside tap use. More than 50% of mains water can be substituted by rainwater. "Greywater recycling" is typically defined as being water from the bath, shower, wash hand basin. The ideal situation for ‘Greywater’ is in living accommodation where sufficient amounts are generated daily for reuse in toilets, washing machine and outside tap. Generally a rainwater harvesting system will feed rainwater from your roof into an underground tank from where it will be filtered prior to being pushed into your house for use in sinks, washing machines and bathrooms. A greywater recycler will then take that water, store it in an above ground tank where it flows through several filtration systems before being pumped back into your house for use in toilets, washing machine's, car wash and gardens. Systems like this are not cheap. Expect to spend an amount proportional to your needs, usage and requirements (i.e. if your house has 4 bathrooms and you have 6 kids your system will be bigger and more expensive than a single guy living in a house with one bathroom.

7) Think
This is probably the biggest of all the tips I've given you. It's very easy to make a few token gestures towards environmentalism "Yes, I recycle my bottles", "Of course i use energy efficient lightbulbs", but at the end of the day being environmentally friendly is more a matter of a mind shift than individual actions. Don't get me wrong, if everyone in the US, for example bought one energy efficient bulb from Walmart in a year it would definitely go some way towards reducing the electrical needs of the planet. But that is only a start. The population need to start having an environmentally friendly attitude towards everything. Car sharing, recycling, switching of unneeded lights, reducing power needs etc., should all be ingrained into people's psyche's. Until this happens the steps we are taking to help the planet are not going to be enough. People need to realise that things should change. As Benjamin Franklin said "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results". If we continue to mine the earths natural resources, waste them unnecessarily, refuse to acknowledge the problems this is causing and still expect things to be fine we are seriously deluding ourselves. Likewise if we expect others to do the changing while we continue to pollute, waste and destroy then the outcome will still be the same.

The choice is in your hands.

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7 More tips to environmental goodness

This is the second in a series of posts about environmental goodness.

In my last post I talked about 7 tips you can apply now that will cost nothing, save you money and help to make you more environmentally friendly.

In this post I will be talking about things you can purchase as replacements for existing items and be more environmentally friendly at the same time. Unlike the last lot of tips, these will probably end up costing you money, but at the same time you did save a lot of money from following the tips I gave you in the last article didn't you..?

1) Get a single serve or environmental kettle:
There are several companies out there that produce single serving kettles. i.e. appliances that will heat only the amount of water needed to make a cup of tea or coffee. Or you can try the eco-kettle which holds water in a reservoir and allows you to only boil as much as you need. It is estimated that if everyone in the UK only boiled as much water as they needed we could run the streets lights for free on the saved energy, and the carbon emissions would be far, far lower.

2) Buy organic produce farmed locally:
Buying locally produced food will reduce the cost of shipping goods to you both in a literal sense and in a carbon emissions sense. If you're buying food that needs to travel 10 or 15 miles to get to you then it will emit less carbon into the atmosphere than flying a load of bananas from the West Indies or Africa. In the UK one of the best national organic food producers is Able & Cole, but you may be able to find organic producers locally who sell in your high street. In the US there is a network of locally grown food producers that does pretty much the same thing. Organic food is generally more expensive than non-organic so make sure you budget appropriately.

3) Buy a dual fuel or hybrid car:
If you are at the point of replacing your car look at some of the dual fuel, electric or hybrid cars that are out there. Or look to cars that can run on LPG (Autogas). LPG cars are popular at the moment in numerous countries including Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Korea, The Netherlands, Poland, Serbia and Turkey. Autogas is also available at larger petrol stations in Czech Republic, France and United Kingdom in the larger urban areas. The former Soviet republic of Armenia may, however, be the world leader in Autogas use. Autogas is between 30% and 40% cheaper than regular petrol mainly due to the lower taxes imposed by governments. It also reduces CO2 emissions by 20% compared with petrol. Many local and federal authorities have converted their vehicles to run on Autogas (and as this usually includes public transport vehicles such as buses it does make them a better environmental choice than cars).

4) Replace your bulbs with long life low emission bulbs and buy a set of timers for lights so they turn off at a certain hour everyday:
This has two benefits: a) From a security point of view it ensures you are never left with a house that appears to be in total darkness, and b) environmentally this will keep lights that you don't need off and uses less electricity through the lower wattage. The UK government is planning to prevent the sale of conventional bulbs by 2011 to cut carbon dioxide emissions and is consequently encouraging owners to purchase replacement low energy bulbs. I personally have low energy bulbs all over the house.
There are a couple of things to watch with these, though
1) They don't work particularly well with dimmer switches
2) they have been linked to skin rashes in photo sensitive people
3) They can trigger epilepsy like symptoms in sufferers.

5) Use Safety razors rather than disposable or electric ones.
Those expensive, flash multi blade things that are advertised by David Beckham, Thierry Henry and Tiger Woods are actually over engineered, expensive and wasteful. Use an old fashioned safety razor. There are lots out there and the cost savings are tremendous (As are the shaves!). A typical purchase and years supply of David Beckhams razor will cost you upwards of $100, but for that you can buy a complete safety razor and refills that will last much longer. Ten replacement blades for a safety razor cost $6.00 (60c per blade) whereas 8 replacement 5 blade units cost $25 ($3+ per unit). In addition disposal is easier with far less plastic and non recyclable waste. Couple that with a complete shaving set based on original soaps rather than aerosol based foams and gels and you're well on your way to an environmentally safe shave.

6) Cycle to work
I have a friend who was challenged by Billy Bragg (yes, that Billy Bragg) to get rid of his car and use public transport or cycle to work for 1 year. He promptly sold his car and cycled to work. In fact he cycled everywhere. He said it was fantastic as he got so much fitter. He was, of course, also at the mercy of public transport, but he considered this a small price to pay for helping the environment. When I commuted for a living I used to take the train. However it proved to be unreliable, uncomfortable and relatively expensive. But nowadays the trains (particularly where I live in England) are much better then they were - although they're still quite expensive. Good bikes are not cheap, but they are certainly a lot cheaper than cars and, of course, heaps more environmentally friendly.

7) Don't fly on Holiday. Take a boat or a train
Not easy if you live somewhere like England and want to visit somewhere like Hawaii (But then again you have to ask why would you want to go to Hawaii when there are so many nice places a lot closer to home?). Try to think environmental when it comes to your travel plans.

In the final entry in this series I will talk about some major modifications you can make to your home to reduce your carbon footprint and help the environment.

Image courtesy of Freephoto.com

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Original posting at Musings Cafe

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7 Tips to Environmental Goodness

This is the first in a short series of articles about ways you can help to avert climate change and environmental destruction. In upcoming articles I shall be looking at how you can be environmentally friendly when making new purchases to replace old items, and finally I shall be looking at how you can make some major investment in your house and lifestyle to help with the environment and climate.

The environment is something we should all be looking out for. While it is true that if we totally destroy the environment it would probably resurface again without any ill effects, but in the several thousand years it took to do so humankind would be wiped off the face of the planet. Not good!

But we look at the advice we are given regarding environmental conservation and it all appears to be something we have to make an effort to do. It's expensive! How many of us can afford to either buy a hybrid car or to make our current vehicles run on bio-fuel? There is a cost involved in that. Personally I think it is a cost we should all have to bear as the price of living on this planet. But it is also true to say that there are other things that you can do, individually, to lessen your burden on the planet and reduce your environmental impact and carbon emissions.

Here is a list of 7 tips you can follow to save the environment. You can follow these 7 tips NOW. There is no cost involved in doing them. In fact they may even save you money.

1) When you make a drink, don't fill the kettle to the top. Only boil enough water to make the cups you need to make. How much energy is spent boiling a kettle for tea (my English background there) or coffee that is then left in the kettle to be re-boiled later in the day when you want another cup? If you're only making two cups of coffee then only boil enough for 2 cups of coffee. It's simple logic

2) Don't leave appliances on standby overnight. It's amazing how many appliances are left on overnight. Each one of them will drain energy from the system and run up your electricity bill. Switch your TV OFF, don't just put it to standby. Switch off your DVD player, your stereo system, your set-top satellite receiver. Go into your office and switch off your printer, your plasma or LCD screen, your scanner. Hell, if you can do it, switch off your PC and router as well. The impact on the planet if we all did this would be phenomenal, and the cost savings for ourselves would soon add up.

3) Turn down the heat!. We all like to live in nice warm houses over winter (or have lovely air conditioned rooms in the summer). But if we were to drop the heating down by a couple of degrees (or even switch it off for whole chunks of the day - especially if we are out at work) again we would be saving the environment and reducing our fuel costs. Making the air conditioning a degree or two warmer in summer will have a more dramatic impact as the costs of cooling are higher than the costs of warming.

4) Drive more conservatively. I know, I know, all us guys like to put our pedal to the metal from time to time. There's a boy-racer in most of us just waiting to burn out from the lights. But if we were all to take a few simple steps while driving we could save a huge amount of energy. For a start, don't rev the car - either when starting the engine or when waiting at the lights. Then, when you pull away from the lights, do it smoothly and without excessive use of the throttle. Slowing down the same way, smoothly and gently. Conserve your fuel. When you're at the traffic lights make sure you kill the engine completely if you're going to be there for more than about 30 seconds. The fuel you waste starting a car is less then the fuel you waste idling for more than that long.

5) Shower instead of bath. This is a no-brainer for most people, but there are some (and I put my hand up here) who do not have a shower installed at home. Bath's waste about 4 times the water of showers, and this water needs to be heated up and then processed at the other end to be put back into the system. Taking a shower rather than taking a bath will result in more time for you during the day as well as reducing your heating costs and helping save the earth. Here are the stats for showering vs bathing.

6) Recycle. Another no-brainer. Most authorities now have appropriate recycling facilities so make use of them. Recycle your cans, your bottles, your papers. Compost your leftovers to make soil rather then sending them off to be incinerated or dropped into landfill. I have three recycle containers inside my house - each one collects either paper, glass or plastic. Each week I drop them into the appropriate bin and leave it for the authorities to dispose off. I regularly recycle clothes and shoes as well as taking the contents of my shredder to be disposed of properly. Each of these actions will reduce your environmental impact without impacting your personal bottom line.

7) Turn out lights. My father used to tell me I was trying to light the whole neighbourhood when I was small because I would go into a room, turn on the light and when I was finished in the room I would leave the light on. I'm much better nowadays. At the moment it is dark where I am and I believe there are just 2 lights on in my house. One is a standard ceiling mounted light (on an energy efficient bulb) and the other is a light unit plugged into the mains (and once again using energy efficient bulbs).

So there you are: 7 tips that will help to reduce your environmental impact and increase your disposable income. None of them will cost you a penny to implement.

Then, maybe with the money you save from following these tips you can order a wood burning stove or solar panels, or even a small windmill to help generate your own electricity! But that's a story for another post.

I'm sure my readers have other ideas about free ways to help the environment...?

Image courtesy of Pikaluk


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Original posting at Musings Cafe

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