Environmentalism Thread

[Geek Nasty]

Don't think we have one, but I've been thinking about it lot more since I'm looking to buy a house. Thing is the up front costs really kick you in the ass. Some of the big and small things I'm looking at:

• Composting. I ready about 1/2 your trash is compostable. So, you can literally cut your trash in half, compost it and spread it on your lawn. They sell bins you can set out and the process works faster than I thought.
• Using napkins and towels instead of paper towels. How'd we all get convinced to use paper towels? Damn things are expensive. I started using dinner napkins at home, but I need to come up with something for cleaning. Maybe I'll go out and buy a bunch of cheap white towels.
  
• Been looking at solar water heaters. These are pretty expensive setups. It's basically a glass covered black box with water pipes running through it on your roof that run into your water header. In an open system, the water on the roof is your drinking water preheated for the water heater. In a closed loop system, a closed line filled with anti-freeze runs through the roof into your water heater, but the pipes are permanently sealed and just heat the water indirectly. Both systems are backups to gas or electric.
• I heard solar panels aren't work it because they're still so expensive to get installed.
• I was even looking at a wind turbine if I moved out in the country. But, those look like a pain in the ass to install.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Composting works really well especially if you grow veggies or fruits. Food scraps, cut grass, raked leaves, and any other yard trash all in the same thing. Turn it over once every six months or something and you're good to go. My dad used to do that when I was a kid, the total work was minimal.

Pretty much everything one-use disposable is a waste of resources. So the more you can cut out of that, the better. I grew up in a family without paper towels so I was used to it, it seems like a huge waste when people use paper towels for everything.

Home size is a big issue. The bigger the home, the more resources you're going to put into cleaning, heating or cooling it, not to mention just the total resources it took to produce a house of that size. Back in the 1950s the average new home was WAY smaller than it is today, even though families were bigger, and people were fine with that. Today we make bigger and bigger houses just cause we have the money, but there's no point to that.

The same goes for what you choose to fill your house with. Just think hard before you buy anything, whether you'll still be using it three years from now and whether it will really make your life better enough to justify the cost of buying it, the space of storing it, and the waste of eventually disposing it. Probably 70% of the time we're more excited to buy something then we ever are when we actually use it.

I've never had solar panels but it seems like I have a LOT of friends in California that really swear by them. That might be cause the subsidies are so high in Cali though, I don't know what the pricepoint is like elsewhere.

Now that we're raising a baby I could make a whole separate post just on that too. You wouldn't believe how much waste the corporate baby industry begs you to generate.