Is Google Green?, pt. 2

My very first post on this blog raised the question "Is Google Green." It was not meant as a stab at Google but more of a question regarding the assumptions we make when using new technologies--i.e. what resources do we require when we embrace new technologies. We are marketed and we preach the benefits but we rarely think of the energy usage, the e-waste, and the pollution generated by consumer electronics.

Today, Google announced its own efforts to encourage efficiency in computer power supplies--a technology that really has not changed its fundamental design since the 80s. We need more to happen than this, but it good to see the weight of a Silicon Valley titan behind this green initiative.

It is also a question that has been long on my mind. How often now, when I travel, do I find myself taking a bag entirely for electronic and their acoutrements. It would not be uncommon for me to take the following on a road trip: laptop, digital camera, iPod, and GPS unit. Which would necessitate four separate power supplies and other endless cables. We have exponential growth in storage capacity, processor speed, and bandwidth. Why not power supply?

Local Eating, pt. 2

A quick follow-up to my earlier post today about buying and eating locally produced food. A recent post to the Worldchanging website as well as an Op-Ed piece to the NYTimes each point out that the recent outbreak of E. Coli in packaged spinach is brought on partly due to the hidden provenance of our food. Of course, locally produced food can have its problems. But not putting any thought or effort into figuring out where our food comes from will only lead to even more problems.

Local Eating

It is often thought that cities are anti-green, anti-nature, and anti-environment--an easy thought to have on first look. Just look at my area, the New York metro area, and all the concrete, asphalt, grime, pollution, and debris. Yet, per capita, cities like New York actually use less energy and produce less waste than many other areas in the country. The City vs Nature debate is not where I want to be writing today, perhaps at another time. I do want to make one observation on food and eating.

It is very easy to buy and eat locally produce (often organic grown) here in New York. This weekend my wife and I went to the Union Square Green Market where all sellers must be from the New York regional area and the sellers must also be the producers (i.e. no middlemen). So now we have locally produced goat cheese; lamb sausage from a farm in Upstate New York (where we sometimes also get wool); Jersey raspberries and blackberries; purple carrots, radishes, greens, onions, and fingerling potatos from a New Yorkfarm. To top it off we went to Whole Foods the next day and were able to get organic eggs, organic milk, and organic cottage cheese all from the region (see Organic Valley Cooperative), as well as tofu made in PA.

Why buy and eat locally produced, organic food? Check out the thoughts of Michael Pollan for starters.

Electric Outlet Vampires

Ok, so it is not my term but I do have vampires at my electrical sockets. Don't know what an electrical outlet vampire is? This terms refers to electronic devices (tv, computer printers, my shredder) that continue to use electricity even when turned off and not being used (i.e. the appliance sits there in stand-by mode still drawing electricity). In any given moment the usage is not lot. But these devices tend to be plugged in at all times and we are bringing more and more of these consumer electronics into our lives. What to do? Well, until electronics companies move away from bad design (design for me is, in part, about stripping away waste and inefficiencies, as well as acheiving a certain level of aesthetics and use-value) and start creating devices that don't drink up electricty at all times, you have to intervene yourself.

A quick inventory of my electrical sockets:

• Bathroom. Nothing plugged in unless I am using it.
  
• Bedroom. One outlet empty--I used it to recharge a cellphone, run a humidifior in the winter, and the like. Another plug holds a clock and my A/C. And the last plug has another clock and a lamp. Two clocks in one room? Guess I never know the time.
• Kitchen. One one outlet here and nothing is in it unless I'm using it (coffee maker or grinder, usually).
• Living Room. Two outlets. One has a lamp plugged into it along with a power strips that my tv, cable box, DVD player, and some small speakers plug into. I flip the power strip switch when I'm not using any of the above to avoid the unnecessary power usage of the tv. The other outlet in the room also has a lamp and a power strip. This power strip has the router and modem plugged into.
• Study. One outlet here with a power strip. In it are my printer, shredder, and other odd computer equipment. I plant to rearrange so I can shut this one off when I'm not using any of the equipment and avoid the unnecessary energy usage.

I did once experiment with a small solar charger that is suppoed to be able to charge batteries, cell phones and USB devices. But it doesn't work very well. I think part of it is that I don't really have a good place for it to get long exposure to direct sunlight. The drawback of living in an apartment in a row of houses.

Snapshot: a Greener Life Metrics

I wrote in my earlier post that in order to see how I could make my life greener and more sustainable that I would need to gather some metrics and benchmarks of where I am right now. The following is a sampling of metrics that strike me as relevant to how green my life is (and areas to focus on). I will add more as I go on as well as updates on how things change. Most of my efforts to green my life in the past has really focused on what I eat, where I live, and energy usage. It will be interesting to see how this shifts as I learn more things.

• Automobile. I drive a PZEV (Partially Zero or Low Emission Vehicle) for about 7000-8000 miles a year. The average gas mileage for my car over its life is 24.5 mpg. For me the car is a luxury--I don't need it for work (I take a subway) and everything I need is within walking distance. The car is really my way to escape the New York metro area. I offset 8000 miles worth of carbon emissions via TerraPass, rendering my car "carbon neutral". Of course, that still does not address my car's other environmental impact, including noise, promotion of road building, and the fact that cars are just a visual blight.
  
• Home. We live in a four-story row-house with four apartments. Row houses are very good when it comes to energy efficiencies--my apartment has just two external walls, the front and the back.
• Electricty. We average anywhere from 6-16 kWh/day, depending on the time of the year. August is our biggest month in terms of electricity use as it is usually New York's hottest month. Our one window air conditioner unit is a thirsty unit. This August we used 401 kWh. We participate in a Clean Energy program. Our electric company (PSE&G) is required to purchase electricty from clean energy providers (wind, solar, small hydro-power) in an amount equal to the amount we (and other program participants) use each year. So, if we use 4000 kWh in the year, PSE&G is required to source 4000 kWh from a clean energy provider. More information about the program can be found a NJ Clean Power. The program exists for other states as well.
• Food. We went grocery shopping this morning at Shop Rite. Not my favorite grocery store (I don't really like big, boxy grocery stores--they are too cluttered with junk food, plastic, holiday aisles, etc), but since it is in Jersey City and attracts a diverse customer base, they do stock a wide variety of Indian foods and spices, organic vegetables, as well as your expected grocery store stockings. Here is a glimpse at a typical food bill:
• Organic Valley milk. They also stock Horizon, but I like that Organic Valley gets its milk from smaller farms local in the area (or at least New England--closer to NJ/NY than the midwest).
• Rice Dream rice milk. Don't know where this comes from or where their rice is sourced. Its organic so at least I know that the rice is not genetically modified.
• Nasoya Tofu. Again, I don't know where they source their soy beans or how far the tofu traveled to get here. But it is organic and thus I know the soy beans are not genetically modified--soy beans, along with most staple crops--are the most likely to be genetically modified here in the US.
• Cheese slices, Salami slices--tastes good, but too much packaging. Why am I buying hermetically sealed cheese slices?
• Kashi Organic Cinnamon Harvest. Very tasty cereal. Organic. Kashi, although you would never know it from the packaging, is owned by Kelloggs. That seems deceitful to me--say what you are, what you do, and what you contain. Let me make the decision if this is a good or a bad thing. The fact the Kelloggs won't put their name on a Kashi product makes me think that they have something to hide in the rest of their business.
• Cheerios. Raisin Nut Bran. I always wonder where General Mills sources their oats for Cheerios--and if it if genetically modified. That would be a marketing nightmare it if turned out to be true--all those babies sucking down genetically modified oats via Cheerios, wouldn't mothers love that?
• European Rye bread. Made from a bakery right here in Jersey. I was (pleasantly) surprised to find Shop Right offering local food. I wish they did it more.
• Indian spices. Ajwain. Cardamon. All the way from India.
• Apples from Washington State (organic). Organic carrots from California. Hydroponic Boston Lettuce from Canada.
• Shallots, Ginger Root, Garlic from god knows where.
• And then various juices, canned beans, canned tomato, etc. from I don't know where.
• We didn't get any meat (besides the salami) because if I eat another piece of chicken I'll vomit, I'm trying to avoid red meat, and the ground turkey (for tacos!) came in these styrofoam trays with the shrink wrap bulging out---hmmmm, no thank you!
• And yes, we drove to the grocery store (1 mile)
  

Living Greener

I thought it would be interesting to do a little experiment with myself and test to see what steps I can do to make my life greener. What do I mean by green? Well, I think a good definition won't come out until I work through the experiment. But to begin, I will define living green as living sustainably (i.e. where the inputs into my life---the PeripateticRambler ecosystem so to speak--and outputs are in balance and can be sustained over a long period of time) and living in such a way as to minimize my resource use and damage to my environment.

And to begin this experiment I need to take an account of where I am(hard to figure out where you have gone if you don't know where you started). And to do this I will pick out a few factors of my life that are easilty measureable and have an obvious impact on the environment. Coming next, a few metrics.

Just watch us pollute

There is a lot of talk about Global Warming these days. Now you can visualize just how much carbon dioxide is being generated and which countries are creating it. Go to Breathing Earth for a simluation of carbon dioxide generation--1000 of tons are added as you watch.

Aliens Invade Penn Station!

Aliens invade Penn Station? I guess I should take a step back for a moment and explain myself. This summer I participated in a scientific study conducted by Rutgers University and the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference to monitor invasive plant species along hiking trails in Northern New Jersey and Southern New York. Participants (all members of the NYNJTC) were trained to identify 22 different invasive plant species and pairs of hikers were given a trail segment to survey. This is the first year in a three year survey; results can be monitored at the study site above).

It was fun to partipate in the study, I learned a lot, and now I see these 22 invasive species E V E R Y W H E R E. There is a Tree of Heaven in the backyard of my apartment building. Two Norway Maples stand at the entrance to the Morris Canal section of Liberty State Park (why do Park Services plant and cultivate invasive species????). And recently, when walking out of my office building that sits atop New York's Penn Station, I was greeted by 10s of concrete planters filled with multiflora rose. Grrrrrrr. The quintessential Brooklyn tree, as epitomized in the book A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, was an invader too: a Tree of Heaven.

I'll come back to talk about invasive species more in the future. In the meantime, the federal government maintains an information center on them at www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov.

Altered Oceans

The LA Times is running a five part series (articles + multimedia presentations) on how we are altering the oceans--from creating dead zones, to the effects of pollutants, etc. Perhaps most striking and shocking to my mind is the description of the garbage that is accumulating in two giant eddies (twice the size of Texas!!) in the Pacific Ocean. One near Japan (trash from California) and the other near Hawaii (trash from Asia).

Is Google Green?

Is Google green? Don't get me wrong, I think Google is very innovative and I use many of their services (gmail, reader, chat, notes, spreadsheets); but what is the environmental impact of using Google (think of the computers, the electricity, the immense data centers that Google is building)? What sort of infrastructure is necessary? What sort of resource use is required for me (and many, many others) to enjoy all those Google services? (Perhaps I should call it the electronic ecology of Google or the techno-industrial ecology)

This is not a light question. It is often assumed about new technologies that since they create new capabilities, productivity gains, and efficiencies, that its very traditional resource consumption is inconsequential.

It is a questioin I intend to address here frequently: how does our use and development of technology co-exist with the ecological network in which we create the technology? Or more simply put--can technology be green?