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I just finished tallying the numbers for December and things have grown but only slightly. According to my scale, I have added no new weight on the garbage front which holds at 32 pounds. Of course this isn't true as the scale is inaccurate at best (bit hopefully consistently so) and only goes by .5 pound increments. My hope then is that i created less than a half pound of trash last month!
On other fronts, paper held at 55 pounds (go worms!), bottles, boxes and misc recycling were slightly up, and the ewaste was as well.
All in all, not too bad.
I do have to confess though, the fact that I only need to do this one more time does make me happy. I love what i have learned from all of this, but, truth be told, the record keeping is a tad tedious. There, I said it, it's out.
Back to the basement.
dave
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
New Numbers For November
Kevin and Bean Say Goodbye
As some of you may know I have been a guest on a local radio station here in LA at the beginning of every month since January. To cap it off (yes they are not coming back for one last stop in January) they invited me in studio this AM for some fun. Its a pretty funny interview and make sure to check out the farewell song at the end.
Holiday Tip #2 Christmas Lights
"Weather forecast for tonight: dark. Continued dark overnight, with widely scattered light by morning." - George Carlin
Let's face it, living sustainably is one thing but giving up your christmas lights is something entirely different. Of course the best thing to do is simply not use christmas lights in the first place, but for many, it's just not the same without them. Luckily, LEDs have come a long way and are here to save the day. (You can read a neat explanation here).
Forever Bright, a really cool (pun intended) LED company now sells L.E.D. christmas lights everywhere from Costco to your local hardware store and they are great. They last for 200,000 hours, contain no glass (no broken bulbs anymore), use only 2-4 watts (compared with 43 or so for similar incandescent), and give off almost no heat (compared with the 94% of the energy in the old kind that were given off as heat - christmas morning fire anyone?).
So let's do a quick break down here. Assuming that you are one of those folks who needs to be able to see your house from the moon around this time of year (I kid, some of them are actually quite nice) and you use 20 - 100 bulb strings, let's look at some numbers.
- Cost per string - Relatively the same if you shop around, less if you buy online.
- The incandescents use 850 watts of power while the L.E.D.s use 60 watts of power.
- If burning all bulbs for 6 hours a day the old ones will use 5.1 kWh/day and the L.E.D.s will use .36 kWh a day.
- If you put your strings up right after turkey day and run them every night, that's 153 kWh a month for the old school bulbs and 10.8 kWh a month for the L.E.D.s.
- Finally, using a base of .15 cents/kWh your same ole same ole bulbs are going to cost you $22 in electricity while the cool new ones are going to run you $1.62
Thanks to Pablo for his writeup.
Dave
Monday, December 1, 2008
Holiday Tip #1
So between now and Christmas, I'm going to try to come up with some simple tip that will help lighten your impact this holiday season. For anyone who regularly reads this blog, you'll know that i may not do that, but my heart is in the right place right? We'll see. Here goes.
Holiday Tip #1: The Yearly Letter
Can it really be December?
Wow. Not sure what else I can say. 11 months down and 1 to go. Its pretty wild to have actually come this far and look back at this whole thing. Of course, as Yogi Berra said (or was it Yogi Bear) "it ain't over till it's over".
