Improving Your Home Efficiency

One of the easiest ways to reduce your impact on the environment is by improving the efficiency of your home.  This would decrease your carbon emissions, and even save you money on your electricity bill.  There is an endless amount of information available online, and endless amounts of home improvements as well.  When I googled it, hundreds of helpful websites popped up.  Here is a list of simple upgrades that can help you improve the efficiency of your home.

1.  Make sure your walls and attic are well insulated.
2.  Upgrade or replace windows.
3.  Plant shade trees and shrubs around your house.
4.  Replace an older furnace with a high efficiency system.
5.  Improve the efficiency of your hot water system.
6.  Replace incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescent lamps.
7.  If you buy a new refrigerator, don’t leave the old one plugged in.
8.  Take advantage of new tax incentives to improve your home.
9.  Schedule an energy audit for more expert advice on your home as a whole.

This list was taken from http://greenhomeguide.com/know-how/article/9-ways-to-make-your-home-more-energy-efficient and the website goes into further detail if your interested in learning more about how to improve the efficiency of your home.  Obviously this list is short, and there are many other things you can do to reduce your impact on the environment.

Cradle to Cradle, the real ideal model

One of the most important concepts with which we culminated the class the other day was the concept of waste equals food or in other words the cradle to cradle mentality. From my point  of view in order to finish or achieve a perfect cycle of matter instead of the linear one that stops at the landfills or incinerators, we need not only to recycle more, but also to design a new operating system that revolves around the natural world. We need to aim towards green engineering for the mere reason that any of the models that we have currently are considered a long-term waste disposal system: the incinerators (if we take into consideration that toxic emissions are unsustainable too in the long-run), and the landfills are represented as an infinite waste accumulation. Our current system is based from the fundamentals of the Industrial Revolution, and back then they didn’t really stop to think about the long-term consequences of production in the future, since the only thing that mattered then was producing in large quantities, creating new stuff and newer inventions without restrictions, in order to progress. Now however, to make real progress we should start designing and envision a system that doesn’t lead towards an entropic world, but  towards the sustainable cycle that we talked about at the beginning of the month.

Sustainablity: The Cradle-to-Cradle Perspective


The Cradle-to-Cradle Framework does not reach for sustainability as it is typically defined. Discussed at length in various papers, books and other venues, environmental sustainability in the industrial sector is popularly understood as a strategy of "doing more with less" or "reducing the human footprint" to minimize troubling symptoms of environmental decline. From an engineering perspective, conventional sustainability too often suggests retrofitting the machines of industry with cleaner, more efficient "engines" to secure ongoing economic growth. But this is not an adequate long-term goal. While being eco-efficient may indeed reduce resource consumption and pollution in the short-term, it does not address the deep design flaws of contemporary industry. Rather, it addresses problems without addressing their source, setting goals and employing practices that sustain a fundamentally flawed system.

The Cradle-to-Cradle Framework, on the other hand, posits a new way of designing human systems that ultimately can solve rather than alleviate the human-created conflicts between economic growth and environmental health that result from poor design and market structure. Within this principled framework, which is based on the manifested rules of nature and re-defines the problem at hand, eco-efficient strategies can serve a larger purpose.

http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm

http://www.mcdonough.com/writings/c2c_design.htm

"Roses are red, lipsticks have lead"

After doing my presentation in class on the production of waste, I was drawn to a quote Annie Leonard included in her book: "Roses are red, lipstick has lead". The idea that lipstick, a product most women use daily, contained any sort of harmful materials astounded me. So I researched into this issue more only to find a report made by the FDA that found of 20 lipsticked tested--in an experiment-- all 20 contained some form of lead. The report then goes on to say how the testing was expanded to 400 lipsticks sold in the Untied States, and the results concluded that the "lead concentration" was averaged at 1.11 ppm. But the FDA concludes that this level of lead in lipsticks, is not any sort of safety concern. The information and conclusion that this report gives leaves me uneasy, because although the FDA states that the current levels of lead in lipsticks are not harmful I worry for a future where they are.

http://www.fda.gov/cosmetics/productandingredientsafety/productinformation/ucm137224.htm#q5

Final Field Trip

Today we went on our last field trip to Republic's recycling plant. I thought this plant was very interesting. The tour that Mike gave us was awesome. We were able to go right up next to the assembly line and see the work at hand. I learned a lot of interesting stuff about the plant as well. With the economy being as down as it is, Republic was given 3 million dollars to build their recycling plant and to "do the best they could with what they had". With the amount of money that they were given the plant has exceeded all expectations. With the plants success, Republic has gone back to the drawing board to hopefully put more money into the plant in the near future.

How other countries deal with household garbage?

After two weeks of class, most of us have got an image of how we deal with our trash and where our trash goes. Though America has already got a good system dealing with trash, we can still look at how other countries deal with trash and learn from them.

Blog 2: UpCycling a Term Coined in 1994 is...

Upcycling is a hip term for taking waste materials and turning them into new, useful, quality items. Items that most of us would have never considered as worthwhile to keep around can actually be turned to new products. Websites like pinterest have been inspiring Internet users since 2009. Before you throw away that fruit punch carton, that old map or your T.V. get in touch with your crafty side and come up with a way to reuse that item or if you need help there is always the world wide web at your fingertips loaded with inspiration. Websites like Esty is filled with users that upcycle items and even make a profit because people, green at heart or not, find these items inventive and sentimental. Upcycled items are keeping trash from the municipal waste stream, so less waste means less energy used for waste pick up and less waste going to incinerators and landfills where overall less toxins are emitted into the environment.

Walmart Plans to Buy More American-Made Goods - NYTimes.com

Apropos of our discussions regarding the global economic system, local economies, Walmart, and the complex supply chain of consumer goods, I just saw this in today's New York Times:

Walmart Plans to Buy More American-Made Goods - NYTimes.com

In the last decade or so, American manufacturers have moved operations to China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and other lower-cost countries as they try to meet retailers’ strict cost requirements. However, recent consumer interest in American-made goods, rising labor and energy costs overseas, and pressure to get merchandise from the design phase into stores within weeks rather than months have renewed interest in manufacturing in this country. 

The just-in-time system of lean retailing plays a role in Walmart's shift (a minor one, of course), according to the article. 

Discussion on Walmart?  Are they moving in the right direction, or is there in principle no way for Walmart to operate its supply chain ethically while still being Walmart?