The Red, White, and Green

Photo via Flickr: Gwydionwilliams

In the midst of ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and stock market meltdowns, here’s some news to be thankful for: US carbon dioxide emissions are down — way down — declining more last year than at any time since 1949, when this sort of data started being collected by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

So what do we have to thank for the full 7 percent decrease in 2009 alone (that’s 405 million metric tons, by the way)? Pretty much the answer to everything in a country that runs on capitalism: It’s the economy (stupid).

From Environmental News Network:

“The large decline in emissions was driven by the economic downturn, combined with an ongoing trend toward a less energy-intensive economy and a decrease in the carbon-intensity of the energy supply,” said EIA Administrator Richard Newell.

It seems this may be the only bright side of the Great Recession. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell by 2.4 percent in 2009, and much of that decrease was from cutbacks in energy-intensive industries. Output from these industries, such as primary metals (-33.9 percent) and nonmetallic minerals (-17.4 percent) fell faster than total industrial output (-9.8 percent).

Industries also focused a lot on conserving energy from an environmental and economic standpoint. Therefore, energy consumed per dollar of GDP also fell by 2.4 percent.

In plain terms, we need a lot less materials because we’re just buying a lot less stuff. And that — not driving the latest hybrid, not installing rooftop solar panels (though those are both good things) — may be how we as individuals can most effectively fight global warming.

The question is, will the downturn in CO2 emissions continue when (or if) the economy rebounds?

–Jennifer Grayson

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[Watch video on YouTube]

In the spirit of Easter weekend, I thought this video was pretty apropos. Sure, it’s a promotional tool for LED lighting manufacturer Cree, and I don’t even celebrate Easter, but I couldn’t exactly resist a chocolate bunny — especially when said bunny so effectively demonstrates the inefficiency of traditional incandescent bulbs.

What’s cool about Cree is that the company is focusing on commercial applications for its LED lighting. We talk a lot about how much energy individuals can save by  swapping out their regular light bulbs for CFLs and the like, but that energy savings is magnified when giant stores like Walmart jump on the green lighting bandwagon. (Walmart is a Cree customer, along with Friendly’s, IHOP, Taco Bell, and KFC — not exactly establishments you would normally associate with environmental consciousness.)

The biggest motivator for these companies, of course, is their bottom line. To wit: An “eco-friendly” (and I use that term lightly) McDonald’s in Cary, NC, has reduced its electricity costs by 78 percent since the installation of its Cree lighting system.

And unlike at home, where the aesthetics of eco-friendly lighting can leave something to be desired, who cares if a store uses LEDs or fluorescents for an outdoor parking lot? There’s no excuse not to.

–Jennifer Grayson

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Photo via Flickr: Photos8.com

Last Friday, I was out and about between appointments and stopped to grab a quick lunch at the Pita Kitchen in Sherman Oaks, CA, since I had read good things about it and was really in the mood for some Middle Eastern food. As I devoured an insanely delicious falafel sandwich that set me back a measly $5, it occurred to me that there’s one thing vegetarians — and Meatless Monday fans — don’t emphasize enough when they’re trying to convince other people to eat less meat: It saves you a boatload of money! (A chicken shawarma pita, for example, would have cost a dollar more.)

Sure, I spend a lot of money on organic produce, but I’ve noticed recently that our grocery bills are now significantly smaller than they were a year ago, when my husband and I were eating more meat. And I’m not even a full-time vegetarian. But just by making a stir fry with tofu ($1.49 a container) instead of with chicken ($6.99 a pound) two nights each week, we save $44 a month — that’s $528 a year! You can imagine how much more we could save if we went meatless even three or four nights a week.

A few tips to keep your vegetarian grocery bills low:

• Choose whole, unprocessed foods (beans, tofu, vegetables, grains) over ready-made vegetarian entrees (much as those Amy’s pizzas look tempting)
• Use dried beans instead of canned ones (click here to learn how to soak and cook dried beans)
• Buy staples like grains, beans, and nuts in the bulk bin section of your natural foods market

For those who can’t stand the thought of soaking beans and pressing tofu several nights a week, don’t fret: You can also afford to treat yourself to a night out more often, since ordering meatless off a menu is usually a lot cheaper, too (a vegetarian pasta at my favorite Italian restaurant costs a few dollars less than one with meat, and nearly $10 less than a meat-based secondi).

–Jennifer Grayson

Do this now: Check out this Monday’s menu on the Meatless Monday website.

More Meatless Monday posts:
Meatless Monday: Lean bean tacos
Forest Whitaker’s slimmed-down look: He’s a vegetarian!

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Wow. Dasani (or Coca-Cola, I should say) is really working hard to make you feel OK about drinking filtered tap water out of a plastic bottle. I caught sight of a new Dasani PlantBottle ad in the March issue of Glamour, and there’s one thing I have to give the company credit for: effective advertising.

Lovingly caressed in the dewy leaf of a plant and topped off with a bright green plastic cap, even I was momentarily seduced by the seemingly pristine looking bottle. That’s a bold step for a company as large and mainstream as Coca-Cola, I thought.

Wait a second. This is water I could get from my tap. For free. And it’s served up in a plastic bottle. The PlantBottle may be manufactured from 30 percent sugar cane-based plastic, but this is still a completely unnecessary product. The Dasani website boasts a new section entitled “Eco-Living,” but there is absolutely nothing eco about this.

At best, it’s a small improvement for an incredibly wasteful industry. The plant material supposedly reduces the bottle’s carbon emissions by 25 percent, but consider that the bottled water industry produces more than 2.5 million tons of CO2 a year. And that it takes three liters of water to produce every single liter of Dasani. I suppose you could also argue that using plants for plastic lessens our dependence on foreign oil, but you know what else would lessen our dependence on foreign oil? Not having a bottled water industry.

An advantage of a lot of the new plant-based plastics is that they’re compostable, which helps cut down on pollution (e.g., the Great Pacific Garbage Patch). This Dasani PlantBottle can only be recycled though, since the remaining 70 percent is still made from good old-fashioned petroleum-based plastic. Too bad only about 20 percent of the 34.6 billion single-serving plastic water bottles bought in the US every year actually make it to the recycling plant.

I apologize for the rant, but nothing revs me up more than a massive case of greenwashing. Is it great that green has reached a critical enough mass that Dasani’s customers would even care about a plant-based plastic bottle? Of course. The bottled water industry isn’t going to disappear overnight; isn’t it better that Dasani is using 30 percent less petroleum-based plastic? Sure. But the model wearing a T-shirt on the Dasani website that says “Make Your Plastic Fantastic” is where I draw the line. No wonder she’s hiding her face.

–Jennifer Grayson

Do this now: Buy a reusable water bottle. I like Klean Kanteen.

Related posts:
Greenwashing alert: Baja Fresh
Avoiding bottled water at the airport

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Photo: Sustainable Health Enterprises

Warning: If you’re a man who didn’t grow up with sisters, you may be a bit squeamish when it comes to the following topic; but stay with me — this is important stuff.

When trolling the feminine care aisle, most of us give little thought to the matter at hand beyond how to get rid of those cramps and preferred absorbency. Judging by the plethora of plastic out there, the environment isn’t much of a consideration, either, despite the fact that 12 billion pads and tampons are sent to US and Canadian landfills every year. But in developing nations like Rwanda, menstruation is a matter of survival: Millions of girls and women miss up to 50 days of school or work a year because they can’t afford to buy sanitary pads.

One woman, Harvard Business School grad Elizabeth Scharpf, has come up with a way to change all this, and to do it in a way that actually helps the environment: sanitary pads made from trash-bound banana-tree fibers. As if this weren’t amazing enough, Scharpf and her Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE) organization are working to help Rwandan women set up their own businesses manufacturing these pads. (Farmers benefit, too — they now get paid for those banana-tree fibers that were once thrown out.)

This is world-changing stuff: Scharpf shared the stage with Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative last September.

I came across Scharpf’s story in the February issue of Marie Claire, but that article is not online, unfortunately. Read more about the incredible work Scharpf and her team are doing by visiting the SHE blog.

–Jennifer Grayson

Do this now: The average woman throws away between 10,000 and 15,000 tampons, pads, and applicators over her lifetime. Believe it or not, there are eco-friendly options out there that don’t suck. Keep an open mind, and check out some cool alternatives here.

Related post:
Save water, pee in the shower

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I’ll admit, I’m human: Today I didn’t have time to make a homemade lunch before I had to rush out to do errands, so I swung by Baja Fresh for a veggie burrito. I like that Baja uses minimal packaging for its smaller orders — usually the burritos are just wrapped in foil and placed in a tiny paper bag with a few tortilla chips — so imagine my surprise when I saw this waiting for me at the pickup counter. Does anyone see the irony here?

I’m sorry, Baja Fresh, but using plastic bags made from 50 percent recycled materials does not an eco-friendly company make. It may be a step in the right direction, but those single-use plastic bags still end up clogging our landfills and polluting our waterways — and less than 5 percent of them are recycled every year.

Quite curious to see what sort of green initiatives are underway at the company — since the franchise uses even more plastic (plates, cups, and utensils) for its dine-in customers — I went to the company website, thinking that maybe there would be a full environmental report. Nothing there.

It would be great if Baja Fresh switched to 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper take-out bags, but at the very least, don’t plaster that you’re a green company all over a plastic bag! Ridiculous. This is greenwashing, plain and simple.

–Jennifer Grayson

Do this now: Minimize the amount of packaging you consume by avoiding takeout whenever possible; or, at the very least, refuse that extra plastic bag if you’re only going to be traveling a short distance.

Related posts:
Taco Bell’s new ‘green’ menu?
Los Angeles moves one step closer to plastic bag ban

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I have to share a little secret: Since the July launch of my Eco Etiquette column for The Huffington Post, I’ve breathed a sigh of relief with each passing week that no one has yet taken me up on my offer to explain the difference between cap and trade and Cap’n Crunch. The carbon cap and trade legislation being hammered out on Capitol Hill is so complex, and the source of such heated debate, that to distill it into 800 words or less would be a head-scratching task, to say the least. Thankfully, someone else did the work for me: I’ll now only have to refer inquiring minds to The Story of Cap and Trade, a new 10-minute video from Annie Leonard and the other brilliant minds that brought us The Story of Stuff.

[Click here to watch video]

All in all, the video does an excellent job making sense of an issue that only 1 in 4 Americans understands, though it lacks some of the light bulb moments I experienced after first watching The Story of Stuff — but maybe I’m just more jaded now. (The first time I saw that now-famous takedown of consumerist society, I thought: Planned obsolescence? Companies are really that evil? But then again, that was before we bailed out Wall Street firms with our taxpayer money only to have them turn around and hand over $140 billion in bonuses this year.)

–Jennifer Grayson

Do this now: We can’t afford to profess ignorance about an issue that has the power to change the fate of the world (for better or worse). Email The Story of Cap and Trade to your friends and family, post it on Facebook and Twitter — spread the word!

Related posts:
Senate needs to pass climate bill
Global warming will threaten national security

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The producer of the Erewhon Expo was kind enough to offer a response to my earlier post regarding the not-so-green promotion (flyers littered all over the neighborhood) of what was supposed to be a green event, although he didn’t really offer an excuse other than that in his opinion, the end justified the means. 

I am sorry about the flyers, but we had to bring lots [of] people to our [event and our] green and healthy living message to lots [of] people. Also, this event created more then 150 jobs, and we educated lots [of] people about green [living] and health. You can’t judge an event from the flyer. If you came to the show, you [would] be very happy and proud that we did something for the community. Next time I do this event, I will ask for your help and ideas so we can create something more green.

Happy to help, Erewhon.

p.s. An RWG reader just emailed me this photo, and I couldn’t resist publishing it. He took the pic at the corner of Melrose and Alta Vista, a full two miles from my neighborhood (looks like we weren’t the only ones graced with Erewhon’s garbage). Note that it’s now been four days since the expo. Any more photos, RWG readers? Send ‘em my way!

–Jennifer Grayson

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Los Angeles natural foods market Erewhon hosted its 30th year anniversary celebration this past Sunday, featuring 100 exhibitors and lecturers — even drawing eco-celeb Ed Begley Jr. as its keynote speaker. I didn’t make it to the event, unfortunately. However, I did see the postcards that were littered all over my neighborhood in order to publicize the event, and that are still lingering days later (don’t worry, I picked them up and put them in the recycling bin after taking these photographs).

Seeing as a flyer was placed on my windshield no less than three times this past weekend (my husband’s car as well), I’m guessing that Erewhon printed and distributed thousands of them for the event (and I’m no Dwight Schrute, but the cards didn’t even look like they were printed on recycled paper).  There are plenty of eco-friendly ways to promote an event  – radio advertisements, posts on popular local websites like DailyCandy and LA.com – even a strategically placed poster or two wouldn’t have created the mess and the waste that these flyers did, not to mention the inconvenience for locals, who had to pick up all the litter. For any company, this kind of pollution is unnecessary; for Erewhon, “a model store in the natural foods industry” (their words, not mine), it’s downright embarrassing.

–Jennifer Grayson

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I was always thought I was a careful consumer–considering environmental impact as well as my family’s bottom line when contemplating purchases–but with the current economic crisis, I’ve found myself re-thinking every purchase, no matter how mundane: Why buy a new shampoo when I’ve got a few bottles (albeit ones I don’t like very much, but still perfectly usable) in my closet? My favorite flats are wearing thin, and I could use a new pair, but why don’t I just send them to the shoemaker and replace the soles instead? 

And that’s when it occurred to me: The current economic crisis isn’t just forcing people to make changes that will help them save money. It’s bringing a sea change to America’s culture of consumerism. And this new careful consideration of how we spend our money benefits the environment. A few concrete examples:

• Scaling back on expensive vacations. Instead of jetting off to Europe, more and more Americans are taking trips closer to home. (A roundtrip flight from Los Angeles to London releases 2,304 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere, according to the TerraPass flight calculator.) I, for one, have rediscovered camping (added eco bonus: connecting with nature, and marshmallows that easily biodegrade in my stomach).
• Buying products that last. When I do have to make a purchase, you can bet that I’m going with the longest lasting, most durable product–even if it costs a bit extra. Less consumption of short-lifecycle goods means less waste headed for the landfill. (If you haven’t seen the “Story of Stuff” yet, watch it now.)
• Staying in my neighborhood. I’m saving money on gas and reducing carbon emissions at the same time by staying in my neighborhood (or biking or walking) whenever possible. LA has a car-centric culture, but is actually very walker friendly (sidewalks everywhere!). Why do I need to drive to some restaurant five miles away when there are a dozen great places in my ‘hood? 

Some may argue that the US economy is built on consumerism–after all, part of the reason the economic crisis is worsening is that people who have lost their jobs and homes have drastically reduced spending, forcing businesses that rely on that spending to lay off even more workers, who then in turn stop spending because they no longer have a paycheck (and the downward spiral continues). But if anything has become clear in recent months, it’s that our planet–and our economy–can’t support out-of-control consumer greed.

–Jennifer Grayson

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