make a smaller ecological footprint

For those who haven’t yet watched the film, check out Story of Stuff

We should stop speaking about climate change for good and replace the politically neutral (or even positive) words with more descriptive Global warming or climate crisis.

Politically neutral term does little and lets people relax and not change their habits.

I should concentrate a lot more on maintaining my car so that on top of ecological driving, it wouldn’t burden the environment in other ways.

Yesterday I had a situation that my car just wouldn’t start, since the battery had died. I had been thinking that I have to take the car to a repair shop to be fixed and to get a new battery a lot earlier, but since I had the need, I started to dig into it myself.

I took off the battery and noticed that the water level of the battery was extremely low and it just wouldn’t charge with dry cells. I went to buy some distilled water, filled the cells and recharged it during the night.

In the morning the car started immediately, in a way it hadn’t been starting for some of the last years, which is good for the car and for the environment. And I didn’t need to get a new battery just to throw away the old one. Besides I learned finally something about batteries in practise. Repairing things is good.

To reduce my footprint I have been mainly doing two of the following:

Biking to work

I have been biking to work now for a while and that 12 km in the morning wakes me up and gives me extra energy for the whole day. Sun or rain, it’s the same, I have shower and dry clothes waiting for me every day.

Dumpster diving

We have been running a two-person household almost purely on food shops have been throwing away, since April. Nowadays I feel very odd to even walk in a super market (need to get occasional milk, cheese and dry stuff like pasta and rice) and just simply misplaced.

In the beginning it was very difficult to find shops, which still provide access to their dumpsters, but eventually I found four good shops to ransack, plus several with access to biowaste containers.

Last weekend I wrote about my first experiences in dumpster diving and this week I have been going around different shops, scoping the possible places for looting.

Unfortunately most of the shops, so far over 95%, have a system that effectively prevents dumpster diving: they have huge motorized containers, which compress the garbage or they have their bins inside locked cages.

Fortunately for me they tend to still separate some (and only some) biowaste. This weekend we found some two kilos of carrots (ok, we found a lot more, but left most behind), plenty of tomatos, a dozen of zucchinis and apples plus some kiwis, eggplants and pears. I’ll be eating a lot of veggies soon.

Shops still throw away plenty of food packed in plastics, which means that they will decompose in oxygen-free atmosphere until the package rips apart. Everything goes in the same: metals, cardboard, power paper, biowaste, glass, etc.

It hurts.

This weekend I am visiting my best friend of mine who lives in an eco-community in Kuopio, a town in middle of Finland. All of the three habitants are vegans.

Yesterday night we went to rampage some shop dumpsters, since the Easter holidays make the shopkeepers to throw truckfulls of food away.

We got plenty of bread, yoghurts, veggie balls, bananas, salad, mozzarella, apples, potatos, milk, cakes, croissants, eggs, cucumber and so forth. Since none of us eats meat, we left all the packaged meat behind us.

All of these products were intact and either passed the best before date yesterday or – at best – Friday the 13th, a week from now. For example the potatos had sprouts less than 1 cm long, which is rarely the case in my cupboard: they tend to grow very long sometimes before eating.

Since it had already been thrown away, the ecological impact was zero as well. We made a sauce of bananas, apples, chili and hemp seeds (latter two were the only things bought from a shop), which we had with steamed potatos and those veggie balls.

We hauled food, which fed us for zero cost and close-to-zero ecological impact (we used electricity to cook things anyway).

I decided some months ago to commute by bus instead of a private car. My success ratio has been approximately 90%, which means that one out of 10 trips I make is by my personal car, and those are always linked to me going to either a meeting in a different place or to visit my parents in another town.

Last night, though, I had problems in sleeping and had to push my night an extra hour in front, so I fell for the temptation to come to work by car.

I wrote this reply originally elsewhere and I thought it might be useful for others as well. Correcting my mistakes is always welcome.

Tankless models are very popular in Portugal. I’d say that if you can aid heating of the water with “solar hot water collectors”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_hot_water it would be great.

Otherwise tankless heater might be a good choise: heating the water only when needed. Of course this means that you will be having an open flame on top of a gas source, which many people find unpleasant as a thought, but I think that a continuous small flame might actually make it more safe (since it burns the leaking gasses continuously as well).

Tankless – at least to my engineering part of brain – cannot be completely hermetic (i.e. closed from the environment) so there is always also the problem of carbon monoxide and dioxide. Well-planned ventilation is essential.

I think that a hybrid would be ideal: heating the water (I’ll draw a quick sketch now) with solar power, storing it into a container and using gas heater to warm up the missing heat.

The idea (attached somewhere around) is rather simple:

1. Cold water is brought to solar heater
2. Solar heater pushes warm water to water storage
3. Newly heated water pushes semi-warm water back to the solar heater (natural cycle, doesn’t need a pump)
4. When hot water is used, warm water will be drawn from the water storage (or from semi-warm line) and heated up with a gas burner

I lack the practical experience completely, so consult a professional before following too closely… :)

The same idea can be attained also by using electricity to heat up the water in the water storage: thermostat will reduce the electricity used for heating according to incoming water temperature (from the solar heater).

This idea is then again very popular in Greece. I don’t know – since I didn’t have a chance to visit any local households on Crete – if they used natural gas or electricity to heat the water in the night time, but solar heaters were very popular.

Since using electricity to heat up water gives energy efficiency of approximately 50% at best (e.g. combi power plants, which are still quite rare) and usually around 10-20% (which is still a good ratio) from fossile fuel burning, it is rather self-evident that natural gas burnt locally is a very good way to heat up the water.

If you have some kind of an infrastructure for natural gas, I’d say to go for it. If possible, use solar energy (not solar electicity, because that would waste huge potential of solar power).

Did the test myself as well.

Category: Global hectares

Food: 1.1
Mobility: 2.4
Shelter: 0.9
Goods/services: 2.9
Total footprint: 7.3

In comparison, the average ecological footprint in your country is 8.4 global hectares per person.

Worldwide, there exist 1.8 biologically productive global hectares per person.

If everyone lived like you, we would need 4.1 planets.

—

This test is unfortunately vague at best and leaves e.g. recycling completely out. I recycle the following:

1. paper
2. cardboard
3. cartons (e.g. milk and juices)
4. metals
5. glass
6. drinking containers (in Finland we have a very efficient system for recycling cans and bottles)

Unfortunately recycling energy material (e.g. PE and PP plastics) would already start taking too much of space in this small house that I have been drawing the line there.

Still, vague or not it gives an idea of where to start changing if there’s need for change. I could quite easily cut off most of the dairy products (I’m having them mainly organically grown), but would it be better to replace them with soy (imported from far-away places, like Brazil) or something else? I don’t think so.

Of the goods and services section I pay attention to the material of the packages and even wrote to local companies that they could easily do better. Still a majority of foods comes packaged (e.g. lentils and beans) but they don’t need to be flown throughout the world – they are dry products that can be shipped.

Ah well… I just have to start paying even more attention to traveling and the goods section. There’s just no acceptable logic that products sold without packaging cost sometimes more than their packaged friends…

A few weeks ago I started again to use only busses in the best public transport system of Europe (Helsinki). No more driving by car

A few weeks ago I wired the TV and computer sets so that all the devices can be switched off (not only to stand by) with just a button press. I do this every night.

Already some years ago I stopped eating meat and nowadays I am approaching lacto-vegetarian diet, not eating even organic eggs. My food is very often vegan.

Still I am feeling that my efforts in reducing footprint aren’t enough. Have to graduate, have to start researching ecological ways to produce energy and especially on how to use the energy we already produce in a more effective way.