Hello Friends, I thought I'd share the latest column from our Finger Lakes Energy Challenge News<http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=4fbdc8c20a028afe3f9f9431c&id=ba14bef017>written by volunteer Ben Brown-Steiner. Ben is working on his PhD in climate science and writes "Ben's Energy Review" for our newsletter as well as the interview with local energy and climate heroes featured in the FLEC News.
His topic this month is one most of us might have wondered about at some point -- how do we really make a difference in terms of sustainable living? You can sign up for the newsletter simply by taking the Finger Lakes Energy Challenge<http://sustainabletompkins.org/programs/finger-lakes-energy-challenge/>. It only takes about 10 minutes and can provide a blueprint for personal climate action for your household. You are much more likely to reach any goal if you first make a plan! If you've been looking for a little help from your friends to get moving on changing your energy diet, check out the Energy Challenge and plug into a community effort to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. And now, here's that article on Reusables by Ben.... *To Make Reusable Things Sustainable, You Actually Have To Reuse Them* In my apartment, you can find several plastic Nalgene water bottles, two stainless steel water bottles, several reusable travel coffee mugs, and probably a dozen plastic or cloth reusable grocery bags. Despite this collection, I still find myself, more often than I’d like, getting coffee in a cardboard/wax/plastic disposable cup, choosing paper or plastic at the grocery store, and drinking water out of a plastic bottle – all because I’ve forgotten to bring my reusable alternative with me. I also find myself perusing new steel water bottles or sleek-looking travel mugs when I’m out and about. This leads to an uncomfortable question. A lot of energy and materials have gone into my reusable containers, much more than go into individual disposable options. So overall, have I actually saved energy or material? Or am I just fooling myself into thinking that I’m being sustainable and green? The tool we need to answer this question is the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Only by looking at the complete cradle-to-grave life cycle will we be able to determine if a reusable option is actually a sustainable option. *Reusable Grocery Bags* A British Study [1] found that cotton bags must be used more than 170 times before they balance out the global warming potential of regular plastic bags. This means that I need to use my 10 reusable bags for several years before they actually become the sound sustainable decision I had purchased them for. Ultimately, however, I shouldn’t focus on the type of bag used. Overall, the bag accounts for 1-2% of the total environmental impact. The packaging that the food actually comes in accounts for around 7% of the environmental impact, and the rest comes from the actual groceries being purchased [1]. If I care about sustainability, I need to think about more than just the bag. *Steel Water Bottles* Clearly, one steel water bottle is worse than one plastic water bottle. But is it worse than 10, 50, or 100 plastic water bottles? The New York Times recently did a brief LCA of water bottles, and concluded that you make a steel bottle sustainable if you use it in place of at least 50 plastic water bottles, and probably many more (LCAs are complex and come with high uncertainties) [2]. That’s good news, because I’ve already used mine for years, and plan on using it for many more. I just have to not purchase any more in the meantime. Conclusions drawn from LCA studies often carry a similar message: reusable materials make sense only if you actually reuse them. If I’m careless with my reusable bags, bottles, and mugs, or if I like buying new ones once a year, then I can’t really claim that I’m using them because I want to make sustainable choices. The same can be said for essentially any material product, from mugs, to bicycles, to cars, and even our homes. *Reusable Homes?* I often see construction projects that replace an older, inefficient building with a sleek, efficient, and modern replacement. However, almost always, retrofitting an existing building and making it 30% more efficient is *almost always* going to have less of an environmental impact than tearing it down, disposing of the waste, manufacturing new materials, and building a modern building [4]. It takes several decades before a more efficient building actually creates a new environmental benefit. *Efficient does not equal Sustainable* And as if that were not enough, we also have to pay attention to the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate [5], which states that any improvement in efficiency has two effects. First, that efficiency frees up capital that can be used for some other purpose. Second, as energy intensive processes become more efficient, they become cheaper and more attractive. Ultimately, if unchecked, continuously increasing efficiency could result in all of that additional capital being used to purchase things that ultimately use more energy, not less. Being sustainable means a whole lot more than keeping up with the latest and most efficient piece of technology, even if it’s an amazing piece of technology. It means actually making tough decisions to make the things we already have last longer while, *at the same time*, using them more efficiently. [1] Life Cycle Assessment of Supermarket Carrier Bags, Environmental Agency, Report SC030148, February, 2011 ( http://www.biodeg.org/files/uploaded/Carrier_Bags_Report_EA.pdf) [2] How Green Are Reusable Bags? Tovia Smith, NPR.org, August 7, 2009. [3] How Green is My Bottle? Daniel Goleman and Gregory Norris, New York Times, Op-Chart, April 19, 2009. [4] Why the Most Environmental Building is the Building We’ve Already Built, Emily Badger, The Atlantic Cities, January 24, 2012. ( http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2012/01/why-most-environmental-building-building-weve-already-built/1016/ ) [5] Monbiot, George. Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. South End Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p. 61. 2009. *Ben Brown-Steiner is a volunteer with Sustainable Tompkins and a PhD candidate at Cornell in climate science.* -- ---------------------------------------------------- Gay Nicholson, Ph.D. President Sustainable Tompkins 109 S. Albany St. Ithaca, NY 14850 www.sustainabletompkins.org 607-533-7312 (home office) 607-220-8991 (cell) 607-216-1552 (ST office) 607-216-1553 (ST fax) [email protected] For more information about sustainability in the Tompkins County area, please visit: http://www.sustainabletompkins.org/ If you have questions about this list please contact the list manager, Tom Shelley, at [email protected].
