A reason to eat less meat

Let me preface this by saying, I’m not a vegetarian…at all.  In fact, I love a nice juicy steak, medium-rare.  I am not at all advocating vegetarianism (especially vegan-ism) because you are depriving yourself of necessary nutrients.  Eating some meat is natural…buying 5 pounds of meat from a grocery store a week is not.

Meat is expensive – in both direct $$$ and environment resources.

Approximately 50% of water, 70% of the grains grown and 30% of all fossil fuels in the US go to feeding, caring for a transporting livestock for human consumption.  The “feed cost” of an 8 ounce steak could fill about 50 bowls worth of grain (Diet for a small planet).  That’s right, when you eat your 8 ounce steak, you can think of it as eating 50 meals worth of grain.  That’s how much indirect food it takes to get that steak on your plate.

With all of our problems in America with oil and the economy…cutting down on meat consumption seems logical.  Eating less meat means less land would be used to grow livestock grain and more land could be used to grow high quality grains for direct consumption (which would take 1/50 th of the amount of land to feed people meat).  With the left over land, more of that land could be used to grow corn for ethanol or other bio-fuels.  Not to mention that there are starving kids in Africa that could use the grain exports…

So if you really want to be a socially-conscious person like you think you are, eat less meat!

I wish I had like 8 hours to make this blog totally awesome with more sources and wittiness, but I do not.  If you are interested in not being a greedy American carnivore, do you own damn research.  I may expand later…

Green picnic

I always hesitate to throw picnic parties simply because I hate throwing things away…like paper/plastic plates, cup silverware, napkins. Seriously, I cringe when I go to people’s picnics and just watch people throw crap away…I especially love when the hosts have set up a recycling bin and a trash can, and then there’s always on jerk who puts his hotdog and baked bean remnants into the recycling bin. Previously, I tried to spend the extra money to buy plates that were biodegradable or made from recycled paper…and I also save about 10 keg cups specifically for flip cup and just wash them out. Yes, I am weird.

For our upcoming picnic, I am super excited…

I bought these plates that are plastic, but they are made from recycled yogurt cups and they are dishwasher safe, so you can keep reusing them…but they are cheap enough that it you have a super nasty one, it wouldn’t be a crime to throw it away (or recycle it, the plates themselves are recyclable). They have cutlery and cups too, but I didn’t feel like putting the money out for cutlery quite yet and quite frankly, I hate plastic cutlery, so I’m gonna keep my eye out for clearance flatware.  We’ll just get drinks in their own containers that can be recycled…plus people are always misplacing their cups and drinks anyway, so it probably wouldn’t be worth it.

http://www.recycline.com/tableware.html

The Recycline company is pretty cool. You can buy razors and toothbrushes that are made of recycled plastics and then they give you postage paid envelopes to send back the used products so they can make new ones. Sweet. Perhaps this is practical when you have a family and can order in bulk, but the shipping charges to get them in the first place doesn’t quite make it worth it just for a toothbrush…we already use reusable razors.

I also hit up the clearance bin at Linens and Things and got two (Easter/tulip themed, but you’d never know it) polyester waterproof tablecloths for $7 each. Also I got these 20×20 cotton reddish-hotpink paisley napkins that would be an atrocity to use for a nice dinner, but fun for picnics or cocktail parties. I cut each of the napkins into 4 10×10 squares and then hemmed the raw edges. I made 48 cocktail napkins for $15.

I suppose we will have to have a small amount backup paper plates and napkins just in case, but I have ordered enough that we have service for 40…a dinner plate and a cake plate.

There is a small smug cloud forming over the tri-state region tonight….”Thaaankkks!”  Good thing I live far away from San Francisco

The green vacuum

Sometime before the wedding, our vacuum went kablooey, so I just stopped vacuuming. This continued until recently…if you count that up, that is about 3 months without vacuuming. Gross. With our wedding money, I considered buying a new vacuum. If it doesn’t work, get a new one, right? That’s the American way. I mean, all of the vacuum parts are made in China so buying a new one is far cheaper than paying an American that earns a decent wage to fix it. Reasonable vacuums only cost like $80 and the incumbent is a little old. But for whatever reason, I decided that we should try to fix it first.

The husband dutifully took the entire vacuum apart. Everything from the base, to detaching the attachment holders and the handle….about 20 small pieces in all and 40 or so screws. We fire up the motor, it sounds pretty good…check for clogs, none of those. Our cat-like reflexes and keen intuition led us to believe that it must be the belt! Head to Lowes, well…they don’t sell that kind of stuff, only vacuums. They must also believe in the American way. The store manager directs us to the vacuum guy at the Farmer’s market AKA (insert race of choice) trash market (I am not discriminating to only include white trash here). Wow. What a place. Not my ideal place to shop, but there certainly was a vacuum guy there who knew vacuum-related-shit. He sold us a belt and tried to rip me off for a dollar when he gave me my change and said to check the agitator brush too…hair gets coiled up in the moving parts. We fashion the vacuum with it’s new shiny belt. Spend about an hour putting all of these little parts back together, which really we didn’t even need to remove…still makes that awful noise. After some inspection, turns out it was the agitator brush, so we got one of those and now it works great! Yes. It’s so quiet now that I can hold a conversation while vacuuming.

Anyway, the point of my story is not to bore you with the details of fixing our vacuum. The point is that I realized fixing things that are broken is another way of being “green”. Instead of being lazy and filling our landfill with a perfectly fine vacuum cleaner, we fixed it…and saved about $50 vs. buying a new vacuum. Sure it was a total bitch and a black hole for time, but next time we’ll know what to do and it will only take 15 minutes. When I think of all of the vacuum cleaners I have thrown away, I kind of get sad.

Energy Savings

We got our first energy bill since the heating challenge started.  It was $95…which is about what we used in October when we ran neither heat nor air conditioning.

From Nov 2006, the average temperature outside was 50 degrees and we used 33 KWH per day on average.

For Nov 2007, the average temperature outside was 48 degrees and we used 17.9 KWH per day on average.

So we used 46% less energy than last year at the same time.  Sweet.

Green living

I have been feeling very green lately.

Derek and I spent quite a while yesterday taking a huge amount of recycling to the recycling center. We played baseball for a while with an aluminum can and a cardboard stick…maybe this is where that time went…

I have learned that it is entirely possible to live without heat even when the temperatures get near freezing. Just wear more clothes and keep your feet covered. 58 really isn’t so bad. Since our house is small, even cooking or taking a shower warms the house up a couple of degrees. Sun coming through the windows in the afternoon makes a nice little greenhouse effect.

Aside: Speaking of the heater challenge, it is not really a competition anymore. We have some really wussy, but perhaps logical friends, that are afraid of their pipes freezing. Now the minimum temperature is 57 or 58, which we’ve been living at for quite a while. It’s still a challenge, but not a competition, no more stakes. So pretty much it means that we can whine about how cold out houses are, but no one wins.

Yesterday instead of using chlorine bleach to do laundry (all of our towels and bed linens are white), I used hydrogen peroxide. It worked really well—they are WHITE. I just put in about a cup of 3% hydrogen peroxide in the in wash, the kind you can buy at the grocery store, and let the whites sit for about 15 minutes in it, then started the agitation. No noxious smells. Chlorine bleach gets me high sometimes… I did not, however, have such good luck with peroxide in the shower. I did a side by side test of peroxide vs bleach to get rid of shower mildew. Chlorine bleach won by far. I’ll have to try something else. I read something about lemon juice and baking soda…

After we go to the grocery store, we keep the grocery bags to pick up Emma’s poop. I always felt pretty good about this. It is the reuse part of reduce, reuse, recycle. But lately, I don’t feel so good about it–that’s still a lot of bags going into the landfill. They have bags that you can buy that are made of cornstarch and are biodegradable. So I am considering buying or making cloth grocery store bags and being the smug asshole at in the grocery checkout line that says “No, I care about our planet, I use these” and sucking it up and buying the biodegradable doggie bags.

Now if I could just suck it up and put compact fluorescents everywhere in our home, I would feel better. I just hate the light that they make so they are only in select spots.