Paper or Plastic? According to one article, the right answer seems to be “more vegetables.” The TerraPass blog did a very interesting article based on a study comparing the embedded energy of
- Plastic Bags
- Paper Bags
- Vegetable Diet
- Meat Diet
Their conclusion is simple: a meat diet is 186 times more energy intensive than the plastic bags used to carry it home. Paper bags were judged to be worse than plastic, meat worse than vegetables.
But, this is the wrong conclusion to draw from the facts.
I am of two minds when seeing articles like this. (more…)
When I started this blog in 2005, I quickly realized that the only way to conserve energy was to know how much of it I used. We have had continued success reducing electricity use. And finally, I can quantify how much we have reduced our water use.
We finally got our adjusted water bill, and we are getting more than $2,400 back from Newton Water and Sewer. Wahoo! (I need the money: we’re not getting a tax refund this year :-| )
Our water savings came from conservation. Here’s how: (more…)
Telephone rates fall in the evening and many people respond by deferring their calls. People with flexible hours commute to work earlier or later to miss the rush. My company’s website (and many others) does processing at night when load is low. If we use electricity at off-peak hours, the cost is less. And if enough people did this, we would actually use less energy overall to make the same amount of electricity.
How can that be? (more…)
Did you see the TV Ad for the We Campaign? You can see it below — pretty nicely done if you ask me.
The tag line is “We Can Solve It”. This new site is well designed and oriented to educate and motivate people to motivate the government to make policy changes. As part of Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, it’s clear what the agenda is, and it looks like they have a pretty good strategy: TV ads, lobbying, send messages to representatives and so on. Kind of MoveOn for global warming.
Here’s the TV Ad… (more…)
A friend pointed me to this site, MetaEfficient: The Optimal Green Guide. The focus is on efficiency, which is generally a “green” idea. This site is more of a newsy blog, but there is a reasonable assemblage of products.
