Killing Trees

I'm a teacher. This semester, I'm teaching all kinds of classes. I try to minimize my use of paper. I always print on both sides of the paper; I use scratch paper to print out my lesson plans and things that students won't see, or I fold it and make it into a little coloring book for my kids.

But teaching is paper intensive. Another option is to use overheads. But then I wonder -- is it better to make an overhead, that will save about 100 pages of paper over its lifetime, or is the overhead worse? I guess paper can be reused and composted or recycled, and the plastic in the overhead will never go away, so I'm guessing that a copy is better.

I generally make my students share copies, if possible. For example, if I want them to read a poem in pairs, I give one copy per pair. Then, I often make them turn it back in and I save it for the next semester.

Many schools are now using ELMO, or another document camera. With this technology, the teacher can project a paper or picture (or anything, really) onto a screen without making an overhead. I imagine that it uses a lot of energy.

What do you think?
Overhead or copies for the class?
Elmo or copies?
Overhead or Elmo?
Slates for each child?

Back to School

I'm a little brain dead with all the back to school stuff -- 3 kids starting various levels of school/preschool this week, and I'm starting back too, after an all-too-short vacation. Remind me not to teach double summer school again. (I'm serious. Remind me!)

This year we've decided to pack the kids' lunches. There are a variety of reasons.

1. I think that the school lunch is kind of pricey, considering what it is. (Today's lunch was hot dog with chili; tomorrow, a chicken burger.) It's not really food that I want to encourage my kids to eat, and it costs $2.10 per kid, per day -- so a grand total of $21/week for my two school-age kids.

2. I have been to lunch, and the kids throw away a lot of food. I think that's wrong. I would rather send them with food that I know they'll eat.

3. Everything in the school lunch is disposable, including the tray.

4. The kids use a spork to eat their school lunch. I'm not sure why the district can't just give the kids a fork or a spoon. Using a spork seems to just encourage silverware problems -- I think kids need to learn how to use forks. Of course, the stupid spork is packaged in plastic with a napkin. So much waste.

But, there are some common problems with sending lunch from home.
1. Keeping things the right temperature.
2. Having the right container.
3. Many people still send lots of disposable stuff.
4. Keeping cost down -- you might end up spending MORE on a lunch from home.

As far as temperature is concerned, I bought a nifty thermal container from Land's End (2 for around $15), and it is great for sending pasta or macaroni and cheese or whatever your kid likes. I also have some plastic containers with screw on lids to send stuff like sliced fruit, applesauce, etc. Currently, my kids are going with water bottles that I fill with ice in the morning (and a little water), so they have cool water during the day. But, the pressure has been on to buy the chocolate milk at school. I am fine with chocolate milk, but I think school milk is pretty gross and I don't want to pay .65 for it (high, right?) I'd rather buy organic chocolate milk and freeze 1/2 of it in some sort of a container and then fill the other 1/2 with milk so it will still be cool at lunch time. I really don't want to buy a juice box because it just creates too much trash.

With all these containers, the lunch box can get pretty full (and my kids have big lunch boxes). We have a couple of wrap-a-mats which we can wrap around pretzels, dried fruit, or whatever. They are basically pieces of cloth lined with plastic that velcro together. You can check them out at reusablebags.com. We have been pretty happy with ours, and they get frequent (positive) comments, but the price has gone WAY up recently (more than double), so I'm not sure that I would buy them again.

Pigs are Flying

I meant to post this before I left, but here it is now:

Rick Perry (governor of Texas) petitioned the EPA for a waiver on the amount of ethanol in gasoline (9 billion gallons are required in 2009).

His argument was that it was hard on feed lots (boo on them!) because it was pushing up the price of corn. Well, it's not just hard on feed lots, but on anything else that involves corn, including tortillas. The high price of corn has driven up the price of tortillas in Mexico, a staple food, especially among the poor, who get 40% of their protein from tortillas.

Turning corn into ethanol is also bad for the environment, as it only produces 1.3 times as much energy as is used to grow the corn, turn it into ethanol, and transport it (which must be done by truck). In the meantime, huge amounts of chemicals are used to produce the corn (pesticides, fertilizers) and instead of growing a food crop, we are devoting more and more land to growing... fuel. That's messed up.

The tide has been turning against ethanol for a while (note some of my sources, which are a year old). It just doesn't make sense, and isn't really a viable solution to our dependence on fossil fuel. We can't possibly grow enough corn to not have to rely on imported oil, and making ethanol from corn is not helping the environment. So.... doesn't help the environment, doesn't help the economy (here or in the rest of the world), doesn't solve the oil problem. Why require it?

So, when Rick Perry asked for a waiver from the EPA, I actually agreed with him. And then the EPA turned him down.

Clearly, pigs are flying. I'm siding with Rick Perry and against the EPA.

OMG.

Importing Recycling

I know that you've been wondering where I've been. I've been a slacker. No... not, really. I moved, and then I went on a family trip to Mexico. But now... I'm back! (yeah!)

I've done a lot of traveling in Latin America, but since I had kids.... not so much. When I went to Isla Mujeres (a little island close to Cancun) this last week, I realized that I hadn't been to Mexico in at least six years. That's pretty crazy, considering that I love to travel and live in Texas.

I'm not sure what the water situation is in Isla, but I have been sick enough when traveling that I was really paranoid about drinking the water. So, for a week, we drank bottled water (boo... hiss!) I could not find it in anything but plastic bottles. Luckily, our hotel had a water cooler that we used to fill up the bottles, but between the water and some juices, I ended up with quite a plastic bottle collection. I couldn't find anywhere to recycle them (or anything, for that matter). So, I ended up importing the empties (most of them, I'm not a saint... I did throw some away) for recycling in the US.

In my previous travels, it was much easier to get a glass bottle (especially for juice and sodas), and the glass bottles were always returnable. Almost every glass bottle that our group used (many many beer bottles, as we were testing all the Mexican beers for an important research project) was non-returnable. Why? Why would they make a specifically non-returnable bottle?
I'm pretty used to this, because in Texas we don't have deposit bottles, but I thought that it was common in Latin America. When I have traveled around, you were frequently not allowed to take the bottle with you if you got a drink, or it was poured into a plastic bag so you could take it "to go". (I know... plastic bag = evil, but returnable bottle = good).

What's going on? Is this common throughout Mexico? Is it because of US influence? Are returnable bottles going out of style? Or is it just because I was in a tourist area?

Save Money on Gas

Pretty much every time I ride my scooter, someone makes a comment about how much I must be saving on gas. True. We've figured out that it gets between 75-80 mpg. Pretty awesome. Today I had to fill up the tank (around 4 dollars) and it was very fun to be right next to a Suburban at the pump. :)

But this post is about natural gas. In our new place, the water heater runs on natural gas. We also have gas cooking. At our old place, we had on-site maintenance (yeah!) but no access to the water heater. Here, any maintenance requires a written request, which for some reason has been very difficult to turn in.... I just can't seem to make myself get three kids into the car to bring a piece of paper over to the management company. I could fax it, but I don't want to unpack the fax. I could probably e-mail it.... anyway. I haven't done it.

What does this have to do with saving gas? Our water heater is broken, and we can't have hot water until it's fixed. Thus, we're saving a bunch of money :)

It's actually not too bad. We only really use hot water in the shower (and then, it's only 3 out of the 5 of us), but it's so stinking hot that it's not a TOTAL necessity.

I looked at the water heater, and it's rated very low on efficiency. It's exciting to see that I can turn the temperature down (I wasn't allowed to in the old place). According to the Department of Energy, each 10 degree temperature reduction saves 3-5% in energy. When we do get it fixed, I plan to buy it an insulating blanket. (This should save another 5-9%, although installation is apparently more complicated on gas water heaters.) We are also considering turning off the water heater for most of the day, but I would like to do calculations to see how much gas this really saves. Does anybody know if turning off the water heater for 20 hours or so saves gas? Or does all the difference get used up in heating the tank of cold water? How long does it take to warm up?

This site says that it's worthwhile to turn the water heater off when leaving town. It also says you can use a timer for an electric water heater. How about gas? If you go out to the garage and manually turn it on and off, will that work?

Blinded by the Light -- How bright does the bathroom need to be?

We just moved to a bigger place with 3 bedrooms and 2 baths. We checked out the energy bill from the previous tenants, and it was a shocking 200 dollars (!). Immediately, C went into action to make sure that we do not continue that trend.

Now, this sounds kind of dumb to me because changing light bulbs just seems so obvious and non-exciting. But, if you look at lists of green things to do, changing to CFL bulbs is always at or near the top. At our old place, we had no choice because the lights were those long tube lights found in schools, but all of our lamps were CFL powered. Now, we had many more lights to deal with, all using regular light bulbs.

C went around changing as many light bulbs as he could (we had a small stockpile of CFLs that we had bought on sale), but when he ran out of CFLs, he just started taking light bulbs out. The light in the girl's room has four lightbulbs -- they were 4 regular light bulbs -- now we have one CFL.
Savings?
We replaced 4 60-watt bulbs with one bulb that uses 13 watts = 227 watt savings.

Each bathroom had 3 regular bulbs -- now they each have 1 CFL. Honestly, 3 was pretty blinding. I don't know if I want to see that well in the bathroom.
Savings?
6 60-watt bulbs (360) for 2 13-watt bulbs (26) = 334 watt savings.

In one bedroom and 2 bathrooms, that's a 561 watt savings, and we only used 3 bulbs!

The City of Austin offers coupons for packages of CFL (I think it's good at Home Depot). I wasn't going to Home Depot, so I bought a package of 10 at Costco for 13.99. Well worth it.

Some people complain about the light that CFLs give off. It doesn't bother me, but if you don't car for it, you might try the following:

• Buy a CFL that gives off white light (these are different from the regular CFLs)
• Consider how many light bulbs you really need. Do you need 3 bulbs over the bathroom mirror? Maybe it won't be so annoying if there's only one.
• Use a nice lampshade.
  

The worms are dead

I've spent the last week either packing, moving, cleaning, or unpacking. I'm exhausted. But I love my new place!

On the last day in the old place, I came home to a horrible smell. Horrible. Totally shocking and disgusting. Blech. I knew that it was coming from the worms. So, I opened them up. It was bad. Even stinkier. Slimy. Gross. Gross. Gross.

Worm maintenance has been mostly C's department, but I could tell they were too wet. I drained off quite a bit of "tea", added a bunch of dry fiber, and waited for C to come home to further assess the situation.

They were almost all dead.

We ended up throwing all the stinking mass of worms and slime and uneaten food into the dumpster. It is some consolation that what we threw away is still way less than what we put into the worm factory. The worms did a great job for months converting our food waste into worm movement and more worms.

We let them down.

What have I learned?
You have to pay attention to the directions (duh). Put dry fiber (paper, etc.) AND food.
Worms can die.
If they die, you will need to move.

So, will I try again? I'm not sure. There are a lot of deer where we live and the neighbors put salad scraps out in the yard for the deer.

Btw, the deer are SOOOO cute. There are baby deer and mommy deer and daddy deer with antlers. We see them every night. (Can you tell my kids love the deer?)