RAD PSP

Room Air Dry is the name I gave to my Personal Sustainability Project (PSP). It was kind of radical because it required quite some changes to my laundry habits. In retrospect, I think it was definitely a positive change. First, I was impressed by the amount of energy I saved by the new habits, especially when I converted it to everyday items like movies and cereal boxes. Second, I thought it was really interesting that I almost felt a cultural-reconnection. I’m originally from southern China and hang dry in households is as common as drying machines in dorm rooms here. I grew up having many pieces of my clothing hung dry. Starting to do this here in my room not only allowed me to feel good about saving energy but also about feeling like I was in my home country. It begs the question whether hang dry can be motivated via a cultural channel.

There are inconveniences associated with the way I was doing air drying in my room. I was running out of surfaces to put clothes and I have to really not think about the dust that might have accumulated on bed frame before I put tshirts on there. Even thinking about how I might partition my laundry load to keep the one load per week principle sometimes was a bit too much. In reality, I think if this was gonna be done on larger scale, we can’t really limit people to one-load per week. It’s kind of funny to think about what buttons we can and can’t push on people to change them.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with my scale up idea of having the HVAC system do the hang drying work. There definitely needs to be more details hammered out like how would we keep that room clean and actual locking system. But I think it was neat to discover that people really liked having a sense of security over their laundry in such a public laundry room space. It was also interesting to see how people treat their time, how some people liked to have precise measurement (minute-manage) and others like to let it slide (sleep on it). I think the next step for me is to see what other obstacles lie between a small problem in each person’s life and a straightforward, seemingly easy and intuitive solution that could lead to bigger change.

I’m also tempted to start a guerrilla movement where we get kids from synergy and columbae to not do laundry for one month and strike a deal with PG&E to get that saved energy to light up something.

The Most Sustainable Pedestrians

I realize this post is rather late in the quarter, but I stumbled across this on a design blog and had to share the concept!

Engineers from the UK have developed what they call ‘underfloor generators’, which will be placed underneath public areas like sidewalks, stadiums, and bridges, that generate energy from the footfalls of the pedestrians walking around (ingenious!). The pressure from a footfall compresses pads in the device, driving fluid through a mini-turbine, creating energy that’s stored in a battery. The developers estimate that the 34,000 people (per HOUR!) that pass through London’s Victoria Underground station could generate enough electricity to power 6,500 light-bulbs!

This invention highlights the power that can be harnessed by taking advantage of a huge, existent infrastructure. There are, as always, financial costs associated with introducing this idea. However, it sounds powerful and scaleable enough to eventually justify its start-up cost. Hopefully we’ll hear more about this endeavor as it gets implemented. Think of the power you could capture by putting in an underfoot generator under the dance floor of every nightclub in the world!

Read the Times UK article here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4087518.ece

No Meat, No Problem

For me, going vegetarian was easy. Deciding to take the plunge was difficult. I had the reputation of the family carnivore for all of my childhood — all of my favorite dishes involved some kind of flesh (Peking duck, sweet and sour chicken, prawns, steak, etc). Additionally, I never was very invested in the food preparation process. My mom and grandma are masters of authentic Chinese food. Looking back now, I regret that I didn’t start learning early. My early mentality of not questioning how or where the delicious food I was served every night came from was quite immature.

However, things have changed! The co-op lifestyle, where residents run the house by performing all chores and food preparation, has forced me to learn how to feed myself from scratch. Though daunting at first, I now embrace cooking. I’ve stopped seeing food as a disposable commodity, but as an essential result of an involved, community-building, almost magical process. The kitchen in Kairos is the heart of the house. Other residents’ interest in the politics of food, meatless and vegan diets, culinary experimentation, general ‘foodie’-ness, and organic farming was infectious. The more I read about all the processes and resources and politics and consequences behind something I had previously thought so simple as eating dinner, the more interested by food-related topics I have become.

Because of the co-op environment around me, it was incredibly easy to cut meat out of my diet. Socially, my friends were very supportive (though I must admit it was less of a “wow, you can do it!”, and more of a “Shelly, what took you so long?”). Logistically, our dinners are always centered around vegetable dishes. Meat dishes were rarely the main course, and if so, the cooks for that night were obligated to make a vegetarian alternative. I felt physically better afterwards snacking on fruit or fresh veggies vs. a piece of lunch meat or re-heated chicken nuggets.

I did lapse several times during my transition period. However, after reflecting on my weaker moments, I realize I ate meat not because I was specifically craving the taste, but because I was hungry, the meat was there, and a vegetarian option was not. From this I realized how crucial convenience is in going vegetarian. The average person will not go out of their way to find an alternative to a meat dish; even less so if the meat alternative is less palatable than the real deal.

I’m really glad I finally went through with going veg, even if it took a class project to get me to change my lifestyle. (or, conversely, props to the teaching staff for coming up with an academic project with the power to change lives!) But in the end, it’s not about militant vegetarianism. It’s about education and a decrease of consumption (since everyone in the world has to eat, a small action on the part of everyone can have a huge effect!). Knowledge is empowering – ethical reasons surrounding eating meat were enough to send me on a minor guilt trip about eating meat – but doing intensive research for DP1 was a large driving factor in my desire to stop eating meat.

Elyse’s PSP

• PSP GOAL: Change laundry habits.
• How: Not use hot water. Flash dry clothing for 15 minutes only. Hang dry.
• Time/Amount: One Quarter, 10 Weeks. 10 loads of Laundry.

• Total Energy Saved: 42.4 kWh
• 12.9 kWh ( from not heating water)
• 29.5 kWh (from not drying clothes an extra 30 minutes)

• Total Money Saved: $4.24
• $ 1.29 ( from not heating water)
• $ 2.95 (from not drying clothes an extra 30 minutes)

Facts for Perspective:

• Using hot water instead of cold uses more electricity than leaving the refrigerator door open 24 hours a day!
• 80-90% of the energy to wash your clothes is to heat the water!
• Clothes Dryers come in Third largest energy suck next to refrigeration and lighting!
• Clothes Dryers take up 5.8% of household energy consumption

Lets Scale up to all of Stanford Students: Change 14,000 students laundry behavior.

Stanford’s Total Savings over quarter: 593 MWh = $ 59,360 dollars per quarter!

Stanford Total Yearly Savings: 2.37 GWh = $237,440 per year!!

For Comparison - (since those numbers are way to big to wrap my head around….)

*** The energy saved by just changing Stanford students laundry habits would be able to power 1.58 billion CFL light bulbs! This is enough to give every person in China and the USA a bulb that yeilds one and a half years of light!!!!

The Crappy Things about Laundry:

• Dragging clothes back and fourth
• Timing your life around when the laundry to take it out – or worst forgetting to schedule it in and some one does it for you and puts it in a nasty pile in the corner.
• Folding.
• Hang dry clutters.

Possible Solutions with Existing System:

• Moisture Sensors connected to alerting device
• Drying rack service with Residential Housing
• Shut off all hot water to washers, provide cold water detergent. (still profiting over $130,000 by not heating the water and paying for detergent

Larger solutions:

• Washing: We keep reducing the amount of water we use. We’ve moved from top loader (40 gallons) to a front loader (15 gallons). Why not get rid of the water altogether. Why not have a solution that is used everytime to wash your clothes that stays in the washer at all times? No water piping in and out.

• Drying: We constantly try to improve efficiency in our deviced by not losing any power to heat dissipation, yet our third largest energy suck is to just make hot air blowing. Why not generate at all – lets have a passive system through solar heating to dry our clothes.

Passive Heating Drying Closet

• recharging silica panel
• concentrated solar light
• black thin metal diffusing heat box
• pull out drying racks
• moisture sensor/lock system
• compatible hangers in room closets

Reflections on My PSP

I found that it was a good exercise to quantify results in the project. Though it’s easy to compare things relatively, the numbers really help bring it into perspective. Often on TV, when I see numbers dealing with pollution and global warning, I wouldn’t understand the magnitude of these values. Quantifying my PSP really helped me understand how big the global problem is, and how much of an impact I could make.

Overall, I enjoyed my PSP a lot. I think I enjoyed it for two main reasons. First, my project made me realize how much I enjoy biking. It was nice that I enjoyed the more sustainable choice more than the previous action. This has changed my daily actions as well: even after the project ended, I am making more and more plans to go biking when I am home. It was also refreshing to see how simple it is to make myself more sustainable. Usually when environmentalism is mentioned in popular media, it’s portrayed as if we need to make drastic lifestyle changes. It was nice to see that small steps could actually make a difference.

I also enjoyed the final presentations, mainly because of the variety they entailed. Last week I was exposed to a dozen or so ways to make myself more sustainable. Most of them seemed very simple and easy to do without significant lifestyle changes. Some even seemed enjoyable, like my biking project. In the future, I would like to try and incorporate some into my daily life, and try to make myself even more sustainable.

Rishi’s PSP – Final

Original Post:

I’ve noticed that I’ve been increasingly drinking coffee or tea at
some point throughout the day to help me stay awake. There are
various places I have been getting my drinks from – the Bookstore, Old
Union, Peet’s in Tressider, Moonbeans, and Starbucks. When I was at
Starbucks the other day, I noticed that even if I tell the cashier
that my drink is “for here” instead of “to go,” the barristas still
put my drink in a plastic coffee cup. It makes more sense, from a
sustainability viewpoint, to make those drinks in rewashable coffee
mugs.

For my personal sustainability project, I plan to buy a travel mug
that I can carry around with me wherever I go, so that when I order
coffee or tea anywhere, I can ask them to put to coffee in my own
personal mug instead of wasting plastic coffee cups each time. It is
interesting that many coffee stands on campus give discounts if you
ask them to put the coffee in your own personal mug, but I feel as
though these deals are not well advertised.

End of Quarter Results:

I realized early on in the quarter that I could not just use my personal mug for coffee or tea, because I was not drinking enough coffee this quarter. So, I expanded my project to include soda beverages when I went to fastfood places. Overall this quarter, I saved 21 coffee cups and 31 soda cups, and made it a point to standardize my coffee cups to a 16 oz cup and a soda cup to a 22 oz. cup. My travel mug was also 22 oz.

The project went quite well and it was fairly easy to get coffee shops to put my coffee in a mug. This was not as easy in fastfood places because they were more concerned with the size of my mug, and whether or not I was paying the correct price for a “small” or “medium” etc. I found out that the majority of coffee shops on campus and Starbucks nearby have some sort of “cash back” program in which you can save money if you bring your own cup. At most, this was about $0.10, but it was still an effort made by coffee shops. I personally found the most thing difficult to be remembering to take my coffee mug with me every morning when I left my room. I normally don’t come back to my room until later in the evening, so if I had forgotten my mug, I was simply out of luck.

I used the Okala guide to find out the environmental impact of a coffee cup vs my travel mug. In my analysis, I found out that it took 9 drinks out of my travel mug to make up for the added environmental impact of manufacturing a stainless steel travel mug compared to a paper cup.

There are three main reasons why paper cups are not good for the environment. First, paper cups cannot be made with recycled paper for two reasons. The FDA is very strict when it comes to recycled paper being used for food intake purposes, as well as recycled paper simply is not as strong as virgin paper and cannot hold beverages as well. Secondly, coffee cups are sprayed with a polyethylene coating so that the cup is insulated and will not leak. This makes the cup non-recyclable. And thirdly, the manufacturing process overall for making paper coffee cups is simply very intensive.

Solar Powered Bike Light! Make Using Your Bike Light Easier

The main problem our group wanted to solve was how to make bike lights easier for people to use effectively. What does it mean to be effective? Essentially, our goal was to make sure that everyone with a bike light had it turned on when riding during the night. Current bike lights are difficult to use, bulky, and not the easiest to turn on. Many people forget to turn them on. We wanted to change this.

The solar-powered bike light four specific features that we designed. First and foremost, it is solar powered. This means that the bike light charges during the day when it is out in the sun parked or riding around, and turns on during the night when the sun goes down by a light sensor. This makes the bike light more sustainable since there are no batteries involved. Secondly, we integrated in the light a way to make it flash so that we could save the charge as best possible. Thirdly, we realized that we didn’t want the lights to be on the entire night, even when they were parked. How were we going to make the lights turn on only when someone is riding the bike? So, we designed a weight sensor so that the bike light only turns on when it feels pressure on the bike seat as well as when it is dark. Fourthly, we designed the light to make it integrated into the bike so that you would not have to install it after buying the bike. This would prevent theft as well as make the bikelight more aesthetically pleasing.

-Eric, Rishi, Divya, Peter

No Really, I’m Not Being Lazy, I’m Trying To Save Paper

So went my plea to one of my TAs to allow me to submit assignments for a class electronically. Sadly, such convenience was not to be had, but despite the setback, my stats for this quarter were mighty impressive:

• 49 pages printed (35 for homework)
• 12 pages handwritten (all for homework)
• 14 pages received as paper handouts
• 422 pages received electronically
• 0 pages of notebooks used

This represents roughly a 75% reduction in paper usage compared to past quarters, enough wood to feed a termite for 5,000 to 24,000 years! The key seemed to be to realize that most of the time, the permanence of paper really isn’t needed (especially for homework). Ink and even graphite on paper is quite permanent, and if your’e just jotting down notes, something temporary would work just as well.

Because existing technology is very limited in input method (keyboards can only enter words and so on), an alternative to paper would need to be made that is easily erasable. Inspired by wet-erase transparencies, my idea would be to have polypropylene or polyethylene “paper”, that you write or print on with special inks that can be erased in water or with soap & water. A single sheet becomes reusable perhaps 100’s of times, and can be downcycled at least as many times (if it tears or wears out) as a sheet of paper can. Feed stocks no longer being used to make flimsy plastic grocery bags could be diverted to make the new temporary paper.

Trying to get Americans off paper, though, is like trying to get them out of their cars. Americans use 6x as much oil on average as the rest of the world, but 7x as much paper. It’ll be an uphill battle.

Save paper, really, it’s not that hard!

PSP assessment

For my PSP, I decided to go to the gym (Arrillaga) at least three times a week, and to never drive there whenever I went. I was only allowed to jog or walk. For the first few weeks of the quarter, when I was only lifting and not doing much cardio, it was hard for me to find time to walk/run back and forth from the gym. Also, I was often tired after lifting to walk/run back, and I found it boring to walk/run alone. However, once I decided to switch to a cardio inclusive workout, running to and from the gym provided me that workout. I actually saved time because I didn’t need to stand around at the gym waiting for a cardio machine to become available. However, I still found it boring to run alone.

Overall, I did pretty well with my PSP. Out of the 29 times I went to the gym this quarter, I only drove 4 times. That amounts to an 86% success rate. Given that a round trip to the gym is 2 miles from my dorm, and that the gas mileage on my 1998 Toyota Camry is about 15 mpg when driving around campus, I saved a total of 3.33 gallons of gas in the 9 weeks I was keeping track of my actions. This amounts to 65 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions and $14.

The following are ideas for scaling up that I brainstormed:

- Having an environmental impact meter in all cars so that people can know exactly how much damage they are causing while driving. This will shy them away from taking short, unnecessary trips.

- Less parking near the gym

- More ticketing for illegal parking near the gym

- Less cardio equipment at the gym so that people run to the gym for their cardio workout

- A rideshare program like 5-SURE that provides transportation to and from the gym

- Encouraging people to work out at home (do situps, pushups, invest in home gyms)

- Make campus more biker/pedestrian friendly by increasing the number of covered paths and bike racks available near the gym

While I thought of some pretty decent ideas, I wasn’t really satisfied after this brainstorming session. I felt like I wasn’t getting to the heart of the problem, which was that even though I found that running the gym was efficient, it was always boring for me to do this alone. I tried coordinating my schedule with friends, but nothing ever worked out. We were all too busy, and went to the gym at different times everyday. What, I thought to myself, if there was a way to always find people who lived near me to go to the gym with?

I answered this question in an idea for a new website: WorkoutBuddy.com. This website would provide an interface that would allow users to enter their workout date, time and length, their residence on campus, and whether they were planning on walking, running, or biking to the gym. They would then receive a list of matches (people who had entered similar information) as well as their contact information. The website might also include discussion forums, fitness tips, sample workout plans, individual workout trackers, calorie/BMI calculators, and diet plans to supplement particular workouts. It would essentially be a social network organized around fitness at particular colleges. While I did not have the web development skills to prototype this concept, I was able to talk to some of my friends about it and get their feedback. One of my friends said: “This would make going to the gym a social activity rather than a strenuous, physical chore.” Another said: “A facebook.com for fitness!”

Finally, I estimated the potential environmental, monetary, and social impact of WorkoutBuddy.com. I figured that about 1000 people go to Arrillaga each day, and that 200 drive. I also figured that about 50 out of these 200 people would use WorkoutBuddy.com to find someone to run/walk with rather than driving. Saving these 50 trips a day amounted to saving 29,100 lbs carbon dioxide emissions and $6300 each year. I also assumed that a concept like this could spread virally and become customized to other colleges, just like Facebook.com did. If 100 colleges similar in size to Stanford adopted this website, 2.9 million lbs of CO2 and $0.63 could be saved each year. In addition to providing these savings, WorkoutBuddy.com would encourage people to become active, and would foster friendships that might not be made otherwise. Not too shabby!

BYOB

My goal for this quarter was to avoid using any plastic and paper bags provided by the grocery store. I realized that through the course of this school year, I have collected an enormous number of plastic grocery bags. I rarely reused them and when I did, it was usually as a seat cover for my bike when it rained. This usually meant that the bag got thrown away once I got to class since it was wet and muddy. Even though the bag did get reused, it ended up in the trash only after two uses.

Instead of being wasteful, I decided to bring my own cloth bags to the grocery store. This was not easy at first. Often, I would forget (remember once I got to my car) and have to run back to my apartment to get the cloth bags. Or, I would forget them completely until I actually got to the grocery store or I would only remember that I didn’t bring them when I reached the checkout lane. One of the biggest reasons why I couldn’t remember to bring the bags was because I was just too lazy to replace the bags back in my car once I’ve unloaded my groceries. (So I would forget to grab my bags the next time I walked out of my house to go to the grocery store) Why was I too lazy? I live in an apartment, which means I have already made a few trips to my car to get all of my groceries, and to replace the bags back in my car would mean an additional trip to my car that was parked far away from my house. There was no incentive or motivation (besides thinking that I was saving the planet) for making that extra trip or giving the extra effort to remember my bags.

I talked to a few people who live in similar conditions (apartments where you park your car no where near your apartment). They shared the same sentiments…they were usually too lazy to put the cloth bags back in their car and as a result, forgot their bags on the next trip to the grocery store.

So I thought about the problem. There was no trigger / no motivation / no incentive to bring your cloth bag. What could I do to make sure I (and people like me) didn’t forget to bring their bags to the grocery store? There were a number of solutions I thought about:

1. making a big bag (for ladies) that could function as a purse and could fold out to a larger bag for groceries. The problem with this: do men really want to carry around a ‘purse’ or man bag? probably not. Do ladies really want such a large bag that they can fit all of their groceries in? probably not. this needs to be refined a bit more before it could go into use. It has potential though, since big bags are in and ladies do like to accesorize…
2. building a sensor in the bag and house to beep and indicate to you when you have left the house with the bags inside. The problem is that it could get annoying and it would have to be an incredibly smart system to know when you were leaving to get groceries…unless you operated like a robot on a very set schedule.
3. building a shopping cart into the back of your SUV so that you can take it out, push it into the grocery store and bring it back to your house without even needing bags
4. Don’t go to the grocery store…have the grocery store come to you…like the Taco truck or the ice cream truck!
5. make lots of little trips to the grocery store so that you could hold everything you bought with your hands or pockets…this would be incredibly inefficient…’
6. charging people for using plastic bags (this is already being done in SF)
7. And the winner: building the Safeway card into the bag so that I could only save money by bringing the bag. So, you will remember your bag when you go to the grocery store.

Here’s the idea: Whenever you sign up for a Safeway card, you receive a bag with the card built into it. When you need more bags, you can request (and perhaps pay a nominal fee for them) with the same Safeway card / number in the bag. This would be initially targeted towards people aged 22 – 30 because this age group tends to live in apartments (since housing is so expensive). The incentive of saving money while shopping (or the fear of having to pay full price for groceries if you don’t bring your bag) seemed to be enough (for me and for the people I tested my prototype on) to remember to bring my own cloth bags.

I know that this may not seem ‘out there’ enough or ‘original’ enough. But, we’re talking about changing people’s behaviors here to grocery shopping, and it’s difficult to easily and seamlessly reinvent the grocery shopping experience. People seem to be creatures of habit and function better when their lives get disrupted as little as possible (I’m sure there are plenty of arguments otherwise). Additionally, I wanted to create a prototype that I could tangibly test on people and have them use. I figured that a simple, not as out there, prototype that could be tested would be better than just speculation from talking to people, since we learned that the only way we could really gain insight into people’s behavior is to observe them. I gave my cloth bag with the cardholder to people to try and it worked. They remembered their bags because they knew it was the only way they could get their Safeway Club savings. The money saving incentive was enough for the users to a) remember their bags on the way to the grocery store or b) make the extra trip to their cars to replace the bags for the next trip to the grocery store.

So, what if everyone between the ages of 22 – 30 brought their own bags to the grocery store? What sort of impact would this have? Let’s calculate.

• Americans use 100 Billion plastic bags per year.
• This averages out to roughly 330 per person per year.
• Let’s assume that 90% of those bags are used for groceries.
• So, one person will use ~300 plastic bags per year.

• There are 42,000,000 people between the ages of 22-30
• Safeway has 20% market share, so
• 8,400,000 people in the age group shop at Safeway.

If everyone who shopped at safeway (between 22 – 30 yrs) brought their own bags instead of using Safeway plastic grocery bags, they could save 2,520,000,000 plastic bags / year!!!

So, what are we saving?

• It takes ~60,500 barrels of oil to manufacture 2,520,000,000 plastic bags
• 1 barrel of oil produces 317 kg of CO2
• 60,500 barrels of oil produces ~96 million kg of CO2.
• Moreover, only 1-4% of plastic bags get recycled so if we would be saving almost all 2,252,000,000 bags from landfills and random places on earth.

So, Bring Your Own Bag…it’s not that hard!