The Death of Landline

I call back my hometown every day, 60 minutes on average. Normally, I use my cellphone to make a call after 9pm. which is convenient and free of charge at that time. So, there is no reason to think of landlines. When I walk pass my home phone, I just wonder that how often people use this device when almost every single one has a mobile phone.

Is using a landline instead of cellphone save more money/power? I don’t know. As far as I do research on this, I can’t find numbers of landline power consumption. My guess is landlines would be a more ’sustainable’ choice. I am going to experiment, when I’m at home, making a phone call by using landlines for one quarter and consider that is a greener way or not.

PSP: Paperless Hand-drying

My dorm on campus, Storey House, has just implemented an electronic energy use monitoring system– the first of its kind to be used in a Stanford residence.  It measures energy consumption and spits out a real-time bar graph of water and electricity use on Floors 2 and 3, to inspire competition.  Therefore my dorm life has recently been inundated with little sticky note reminders on light switches and appliances to “Save the Earth! Turn off the light when you leave!” and “Try air-drying your clothing instead of using this dryer.”  Though I initially found these sticky notes a bit intrusive, I have found them to be quite helpful in reminding me to use just a little bit less of everything: heat, water, electricity, paper.  The one I’ve most ignored however, is the reminder to use cloth towels instead of paper towels when drying your hands.  Paper towels are so convenient and clean that they’re hard to give up, especially when my towel is in my room.  They always seem to be in such abundance in Storey’s bathroom that it’s difficult to imagine any other way to dry my hands.

For my PSP, I’ve decided to either air-dry my hands after washing them, or use my cotton towel instead.  To measure the quantity of paper saved, I’ll assume that I will be saving about 24” x 12” of paper towels per handwash.

-Laura Chang

Reducing Disposable Containers

I have been using reusable grocery bags and water bottles for the past few years. However, I have found that I still accumulate many plastic bags. While these are not grocery bags, they are shopping bags, takeout bags, restaurant bags, etc. Moreover, I realized that I generate a lot of trash from the use of disposable containers (specifically those that package food).

For example, over the course of the year, I developed the habit of getting coffee nearly every morning (and sometimes several times a day). This basically amounts to about 5-10 coffee cups thrown away each week. Additionally, if I buy lunch on campus (which happens usually 3 days a week), I will throw away the container the food came in as well as the disposable utensils. If I happen to bring my own lunch, I will often have those individual yogurt cups or pack fruit in disposable ziplock bags. I also rarely finish my meal when I go out to restaurants, meaning I end up bringing home leftovers in a takeout container. All-in-all, this amounts to a lot of containers that are only used once and thrown away.

The goal of my personal sustainability project is to reduce the amount of one-time-use containers by using a reusable solution as much as possible. Bringing my own bags in all situations which I may need a bag, bringing my own coffee mug, bringing home leftovers in my own tupperware, etc. I will measure the amount I save by recording all instances where I normally would have used a disposable container and what solution I used (including if I forgot). At the end of the quarter, I will determine the amount I have saved (number of times I used a reusable solution divided by the total number of times a disposable solution was offered). My end goal is to reduce the use of disposable containers by at least 50%.

Eat Less Meat

Project 3 Proposal: PSP

I was never a vegetarian, and I think I may never be….  But for conserving more natual resources, and for the sake of my own health, I plan to eat less meat in the next couple of weeks.

Animals are inefficient calorie converters. Research shows that animal based food takes in up to 40 times more energy from feed than humans yield from eating it. I have never seriously recorded how much the portion of animal based food is in my total food consumption. But I think currently approximately 40% of the weight of food I consume is animal based (beef, pork, sea-food, cheese, etc). For the next 10 weeks, I will reduce this portion to be 20%, and will see how much energe is saved from the adjusted food chain.

Paper towels no more

As I tried to find manageable ways to reduce my environmental footprint, I realized that I generally use an inordinate amount of paper towel every time I wash my hands or face, brush my teeth, floss, etc., mostly because I just like having dry hands.  However, this ‘clean feeling’ of having dry hands comes at the price of trees upstream and landfill waste downstream (and why are there no recycling bins in bathrooms where nearly all trashcan waste consists of paper towel?).  I estimate that I use upwards of 10 square feet of paper towel a day.

And so, for my PSP, I plan on taking my small hand towel with me to the bathroom as much as I possibly can in order to avoid paper towel use.  I will begin by writing down my normal usage after recording it for a day and then keep track of how many sections of paper towel I use whenever I do end up using it, and thus be able to calculate total square feet of paper (and thus trees, energy, and carbon) used and saved.

Drying my hair with natural air

I never realized how much energy it takes to power a hair dryer – not until I saw Jeremy Faludi’s presentation of a hair dryer case study last week. Although I spend minimal time on doing my hair, the small amount of time I spend using a hair dryer can still have an impact.

Problem: I use a 1500W dryer for about 5 minutes a day, 6 days a week – that adds up to 39 kWh per year. That is enough energy to power a 60W light bulb for 12.5 hours per week (I hope those calculations are right). That seems like a lot of energy and money that could be spent in better ways than drying my hair.

PSP Goal: I will use my hair dryer no more than 5 minutes per week. I will keep track of how many times my hair needs to get dry, whether or not I used a dryer, amount of time I used the dryer, and also why I decided to use it. I hope that, by recording the situations in which I choose to use a dryer, I can better plan out my day so that I can avoid such situations and thus reduce my reliance on the dryer.

Green Washing

The idea came from the fact that my brother, who studies CS at another university, leaves his computer on all night.  I always turn my computer off at night, but there are periods throughout the day, during which I leave my computer on when I am not in the room. For example, I may leave to eat dinner, leaving my computer on, but not being used, for 45 minutes.  My computer is a high-powered desktop computer, which sucks up lots of energy when it is active.

During the next few weeks, I will put my computer in “sleep” mode when I am not going to be in the room. This can minimize the energy usage of the computer by 60-70%.  I will tabulate the amount of hours that the computer spends in sleep mode, rather than in awake mode.  From that, I can calculate energy saved, fossil fuel use avoided, and other characteristics.