Power Saver of Griffin

This idea came mostly from being abroad in Germany living with a host family. Something that I learned from my host father was the exorbant amount of energy to keep your laptop and any other electronic appliance to remain on standby. He claimed that it took an entire power plant to keep all these devices to remain, while they were not even being used. This is a waste of energy and power.

As such, for my DP3 I am going to challenge myself to turn off my computer, my power surge, and any other electronic appliance in my suite. In order to create a more quantitative assessment of my project, I am going to focus on my laptop. I will keep a record of time that computer would usually be on, at night, away during the day, and etc. I hope to calculate how much energy was saved during the quarter.

digi-green

I typically take notes and print out the slides for all of my classes only to end up throwing all of it away at the end of the school year (spring cleaning I guess). Instead of contributing in the killing of trees I will use my tablet PC (http://www.dell.com/tablet) to take notes and save slides. In the past out of laziness I have asked the TA if I could just email my homework in, but haven’t yet to be successful at that effort. So I won’t be able to totally conserve. I do believe that not having to take notes on paper and not using printouts of the slides will help cut back on 70% of my paper usage though. I guess you can say that I’m trying to be green in a digital way.

First Light

It’s 8:00AM. This is the earliest I’ve been up all quarter. I’m writing this blog post using only the natural morning light. According to a 2006 study by the International Energy Agency, nineteen percent of global electricity generation is taken for lighting. On a residential level nearly a quarter of all home-energy usage is for lighting.

My Personal Sustainability Project is to cut down on the amount of energy I use on artificial lighting.  I will accomplish this by taking advantage of natural lighting as much as possible. That means I’m going to start waking with the sun.

The Problem: On average I am awake from 11AM to 3AM.  This time of year the sun provides sufficient light between the hours of 7:00AM and 7:00PM.  During the daylight hours I don’t need artificial lighting,  so I end up using 8 hours of artificial light (7PM-3AM) along with 8 hours of natural light (11AM-7PM).  I am wasting 4 hours of natural light.

The Solution: Wake up 4 hours earlier and go to sleep 4 hours earlier.  By shifting my sleep cycle by 4 hours I can decrease the amount of time I need artificial light to 4 hours (7PM-11PM), while increasing my usage of natural light to 12 hours (7AM-7PM).  This simple solution will decrease my personal energy usage for lighting by 50 percent.

The Goal: My personal sustainability goal is to decrease the amount of artificial light I use by 50 percent.

The Metric: I will record the time I wake and go to sleep everyday, as well as the hours I require the use of artificial light.  At the end of the quarter I will calculate the average number of hours per day I used artificial light and compare that to my baseline light usage defined as 8 hours per day.

Drying hands without filling landfills

I’m kind of obsessive compulsive, and I wash my hands fairly frequently.  In the course of doing this I feel like I waste a lot of paper towels.  This is also true when I eat food at places with paper napkins, I generally take more than I need.  I also use paper napkins at home instead of cloth napkins or towels.

Our DP1 project has shown that paper towels are worse for the environment than electric dryers because they add to landfill mass and consume resources.  While electric dryers are better than paper towels, an even better alternative is to use a reusable towel or even to wipe your hands on your pants.

To reduce my impact, I’m planning to not use paper towels in public bathrooms.  Additionally, I’m limiting myself to one paper napkin per meal, and to utilize cloth napkins when possible.  I’m also considering carrying around a fabric towel that I can use, and just let it air dry.  Once you’ve washed your hands, you’re basically wiping clean water onto the towel so it won’t get dirty very quickly.  I also think that in the course of the next 6 weeks or so, I’ll figure out a better method for drying my hands just out of annoyance from having wet hands.  I’m already brainstorming ideas.  Overall, I hope to reduce my personal waste and energy usage in a small but quantifiable way.  By the end of the quarter I hope to have developed convenient, green habits that I can continue after this course is over.

Sigg bottle instead of plastic

I try to drink about 5 full water bottles daily.
I buy them from Safeway in packs of 24, drink them, and recycle.
Even though I am recycling the plastic, I want to minimize the amount of plastic that I use. Creating plastic from recycled bottles is more efficient than creating them from raw materials. However, if I continue to reuse the same bottle, I will save more energy than the recycling process does.
So, for my project, I will only drink water from a “Sigg” bottle. I want to compare how much energy is saved from reusing a bottle vs. recycling bottles vs. creating plastic bottles from raw materials.

A xenophobe’s guide to sustainability

ME222 DP3 PSP: reduce the environmental impact associated with importing goods by buying only USA made products.

It took me a while to find some way to reduce my environmental footprint, as I bike everywhere, seldom buy new things, use little water and electricity, and recycle or compost most everything. Now, this has not been a life-long dedication to the environment. I grew up in Dallas, Texas, where “green” meant “inexperienced” and “sustainable” referred to how long the oil well in your backyard was going to provide you with cash. My father is a conservative and doesn’t buy into the conservation or environmental movements, and yet he is one of the most “green” people I know.  The simple reason: he’s cheap. Cheap people don’t like to waste, and so my father instilled in me that conservative mentality from an early age (where conservative means literally “to conserve”).

I wanted to find a way to be sustainable that held true to my father’s beliefs of conservation, and one thing that we can conserve as Americans is our GDP. To help keep money from going over seas, I decided to see if it is economical and environmentally impactful to only purchase things that are made in the USA ( with a strong preference to them being from the SF Bay Area).  These purchases, outside of food and services, will be recorded in a diary and I will LCA the aggregated purchase list to find if I’ve made a noticeable reduction in my environmental impact.