Category Archives: Year Of No Garbage

Busy is a Four Letter Word

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I’m guilty of this crime as much as anyone I know… but. You know what makes me crazy? When you ask people how they are and they say “Busy!”

One reason it bothers me, I think, is because it says absolutely nothing. Saying you’re “busy” is another version of “I’m fine”: it pretends to be informative, but it really isn’t.

Another reason this answer bothers me, though, is because it is symptomatic of what we culturally value: busyness. God forbid we all slow down and think for a few minutes. I think one of the potential benefits we can take from a terrible, tragic event such as a 9/11 or a pandemic is that it forces people to stop, to snap out of their I’m so busy lives, step off the never-ending treadmill and actually consider what the world is like, and their lives in it.

Is this what I want? we stop to ask ourselves. Do my actions reflect my values?

I’m not saying no one out there is ever thoughtful or contemplative until catastrophe strikes, but just that normally our culture tends to discourage thoughtfulness… and I’m so busy is a symptom of what I would call a destructive tendency to carry on and not think too deeply about troublesome things.

This is why a person like Greta Thunberg is so striking, and unnerving, to many of us. She immediately understood the problem with carrying on as if nothing were wrong and decided- against incredible social pressures to go to school, to think about her grades, her future- to stop being too busy to do anything about it. Thunberg is proof that being busy isn’t always the way to be most effective. In fact sometimes stopping is the most important thing you can do.

Doing a project like a Year of No Garbage is one way to force myself to stop being busy, and instead focus on life from a new vantage point. It’s not something everyone can do, obviously, because there are mortgages to worry about and car payments to make and kids to feed, but if I can go to that strange country of Stopping, that means I can report back to everyone else what I found out in my travels.

I can report, for example that lately I find myself questioning some pretty fundamental things about the way our family lives that previously I always took for granted. For example:

  • Sure we live in a rural area, but do we really need two cars? Like, really?
  • Sure, single-stream recycling is much easier, but is separating and hauling our recycling to the local transfer station a better, more effective option? (They take more things- broken glass, batteries, small appliances- and the service is free, to residents.)
  • Is there another way we can affordably heat our house that is more earth friendly?

And I’m re-examining things I previously just accepted at face value:

  • Are most “recyclables,” in fact, being recycled? (Answer: Stay tuned.)
  • Are most “compostables” actually compostable? (Answer: Nope.)
  • How does my detergent-free laundry system actually work? Is it really harmless to myself and the environment? (Answer: This post.)

We are told so many things by our culture, and often we accept them, even when they are completely contradictory. We are told that the things we do as individuals matter in the grand scheme of things: Voting. Thinking globally and acting locally. Recycling. Shunning straws. Bringing your own bags. Voting with your checkbook by buying organic produce, supporting your local farmer, buying the more expensive product with recycled packaging.

But we’re also told that there are some things for which there is simply no solution. We just have to throw away certain materials. There is just no way to recycle everything.

Really? Because the village of Kamikatsu in Japan recycles 80 percent of their waste. Watch this video and you’ll see them doing all those things that are supposedly impossible for the average citizen to do: washing out flexible plastics, drying packaging on hanging racks, sorting recyclables into forty-five different categories.

This four minute video is worth the watch

Yes, the individual does matter, but it only goes so far; there are some things one individual cannot do alone. If the system doesn’t exist to manage forty-five different kinds of recyclables, one person can’t will it into existence- and believe me I’ve tried.

For every Zero-Waster out there wrapping cheese in burlap and string, there are a hundred more people putting perfectly good things in the landfill just because it’s easier and they have to get on with it. Because: busy. If I’m honest, I have been each of these people at different times in life. We need a system that will work for both of them.

Our society’s been talking about recycling since the seventies: fifty years. So why doesn’t such a system already exist? Compared to Kamikatsu’s 80%, why do Americans recycle only 35% of our waste? I blame too busy. We’re too busy to think more deeply about the overall way our society is constructed. When we’re too busy we throw things away because figuring it out too hard. Or the compost is icky. Or taking the trouble to bring some packaging home is inconvenient. When we’re too busy we accept the lies that “compostable” packing is actually compostable, that recyclable is truly recyclable, and that some things just can’t be recycled. When we’re too busy we fall victim to “green washing,” and practice “wishful recycling,” and accept that a picture of an arrow or a tree somewhere on a product means something, when we should know better. Too busy means something else is taking your time and attention instead of the matter at hand. Greta Thunberg is right: the environment is the matter at hand and there is nothing else that even remotely comes close to it. What could possibly be more important? Without an environment in which to take place, all those things that keep us so blissfully busy will- one day-cease to exist.

Johnny Cash does a lovely rendition of “I’m Being Swallowed by a Boa Constrictor”

It won’t happen all at once. It happens slowly, like being swallowed by a snake. Remember that old Shel Silverstein song “I’m Being Swallowed by a Boa Constrictor”? The kid keeps singing, describing different parts of him being swallowed: “Oh no, he swallowed my toe!” and “Oh me, he swallowed my knee!” The punch line comes at: “Oh dread, he’s up to my – slurp!”

So I think, if you are able to take the opportunity to stop and reevaluate how you go about your daily life, then take advantage of it. But, no matter what, be wary of being too busy. The snake smiles at that answer.

What would happen, I wonder, if the next time you were asked “How are you?” you were to answer: “I’m thinking” ?

Demystifying My Magical Washing Machine

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Pods. You know them: those little packets that are supposed to save us from the arduous and soul-destroying task of having to actually measure liquid detergent. The horror.

Lately quite a few ads have been trying to persuade me to change laundry detergent and use eco-friendly pods instead. But we are lucky, because in our house we don’t have to worry about laundry detergent containers junking up the landfill, or petro-chemicals in our detergent, or even whether the biodegradable plastic that encases the pods is really okay… because we don’t use laundry detergent at all.

My Laundry Room. Sexy, right?

Instead we have a system called an EcoWasher. Essentially, this is an appliance the size of supermarket sheet cake. It attaches to the wall above your washing machine and magically makes your clothes clean.

At least this is how it was explained to me at the appliance store. What I heard was “You don’t have to buy laundry detergent anymore!” It also didn’t hurt that this supernatural contraption would pay for itself pretty quickly: the average American family spends $180 per year on laundry detergent; an EcoWasher costs $400. On top of that it only washes in cold, so you save the cost of heating the water; and depending who you ask that amounts to another $150-$300 savings per year.

We particularly liked the fact that we could get away from traditional detergents that contain harmful chemicals and fragrances- better for us, better for the environment. After all, if the average American household uses 5,600 gallons of water per year washing clothes, and there are roughly 130 million American households, this means that we have something like 728 billion gallons per year of petro-chemical-filled water flooding back into our waterways. Ick.

We were convinced. We got it home and hooked the panel up to our washing machine, and were amazed to find that it was true: our clothes somehow came out clean, using only cold water. How was this possible? I had no idea.

But inspired by those ads for eco-pods, I began to wonder- what was going on in my washing machine? So I looked into it. On EcoWasher’s website they explain that inside the flat panel our water goes through “ozone infusion” creating something called “Hydroxyl Radicals.” It is the Hydroxyl Radicals that attack the bacteria in clothes.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. Up until now, I had just kind of blissfully accepted that my EcoWasher knew what it was doing and we left each other alone, but now that I had this modicum of information, complete with chemically-sounding words? I was made of questions:

Ozone infusion– is that okay?

Where does the ozone come from?

Does it get released? Is that good or bad?

And Hydroxyl Radicals- are those like free radicals?

Aren’t free radicals bad?

All of this brought me to the $64,000 question: does infusing ozone and creating Hydroxyl Radicals in my washing machine do any damage to me, my family or to the environment?

Even as I wonder this a rational angel appears on my shoulder whispering “Oh Eve- don’t you think if this technology was creating a dangerous rip in the time-space continuum we’d have heard about it by now?” Not surprisingly, the conspiracy theorist angel on my other shoulder isn’t convinced. “Hey Eve, exactly how many things has civilization thought was a wonderful new idea, only to find out it was wonderfully harmful instead? Shall we count them?” The list is long.

In an attempt to get to the bottom of such questions I called EcoWasher. While I waited for them to call me back I watched a whole bunch of YouTube videos and read articles explaining ozone laundry technology. I found out that the EcoWasher is based on technology that has been used in hospitals and resorts for decades. I also found out that Hydroxyl Radicals are famous in the world of chemistry for acting like “nature’s detergent,” decomposing pollutants, and neutralizing viruses and bacteria. All this sounded pretty good.

But reputable sources agree: Hydroxyl Radicals are free radicals and are bad- at least when they are in our bodies. In the atmosphere, however, they turn into good guys, scrubbing the stratosphere like your grandmother’s linoleum floor. Chemistry is confusing this way: because it’s almost impossible to keep the good guys and bad guys straight when they keep shape shifting depending upon their context. On top of its Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde personality, I learned that Hydroxyl Radicals have a life span of less than one second. Interestingly, this is why the water in your laundry needs to be cold: because warmer temperatures reduce the lifespan of the Hydroxyl Radicals, and they didn’t have that much to work with to begin with.

I concluded, Hydroxyl Radicals sounded a lot scarier than they really were. I figured as long as little suckers stay out of my body and in my washing machine for their short little one-second lives, I probably didn’t need to freak out about them very much.

But what about the ozone? Where did it come from? Where did it go?

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that once again the answer is “it depends!” Of course, when ozone is in the stratosphere, or upper atmosphere, it protects the earth from damaging UV rays. Most of us came to know this back in the 1980s when it was revealed that chlorofluorocarbons were creating a dangerous hole in this protective layer. So: ozone= good guy!

But put ozone in another context and everything changes. When ozone is present in the troposphere, or lower atmosphere, it becomes a greenhouse gas, trapping heat and warming the planet, not to mention causing problems for people with breathing disorders. Plus- and this blew my mind a little bit- did you know that ozone is just another kind of oxygen? It’s called an allotrope, meaning an element that takes different physical forms.

I’m not sure if my 11th grade chemistry teacher would be proud of me for figuring this much out, or sobbing softly into a hankie. Regardless, I felt pretty good about being able to cobble together a rudimentary understanding of what was otherwise just a bunch of scary-sounding science words.

To recap: ozone laundry systems take oxygen from the air and charge it with electricity, turning it into the form of oxygen known as ozone. Hydroxyl Radicals are then formed as a result of the reaction between the water and the ozone/oxygen. Then they do the good work of killing the bacteria makes our clothes smell, before dying a graceful death at the ripe old age of one second.

It sounds good, and I’m so glad because I really didn’t want to start buying detergent again. There are still a few things I wonder though: Where does the ozone go? Does it, too, degrade and basically disappear once its job is done, like the Hydroxyl Radicals? Also, I wonder how the Hydroxyl Radicals clean my clothes if they have such a short lifespan- is one second even enough time to get to my clothes?

And just for fun, I wonder: would this same technology work on a dishwasher as well? If not, why not? Cause I’d love to stop buying dish detergent too.

I’ve called EcoWasher several times with no response yet, so I’m going to wonder these last few mysteries a while longer. But I feel both empowered and reassured by understanding a bit better the science at work in this fascinating little box.

Post Script: I’m not being paid by EcoWasher to talk about their product- it is just the one we happen to have. I should point out that EcoWasher is just one of a variety of different such “Ozone Laundry Systems” on the market today- here is a link to a YouTube video that describes several of them.

 

 

A Burning Question

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Ever wonder where the wax goes when a candle burns? Or what the carbon footprint of a campfire is? How does that compare to the heating of your house? Are candles harmful? What about burning butter wrappers? Come to think of it, is burning anything okay?

These are the rabbit holes I go down. Alice would be jealous.

The Dartmouth Annual Bonfire

I’ve been thinking a lot about fire lately because we have an outdoor fireplace, and on summer evenings my husband Steve may often be found rooting around for a quick fire starter. Whenever I don’t have enough reusable bags at the grocery store, I request a paper bag, knowing that Steve will use it to start our next family campfire. Then, not too long ago, I got an idea: why not put other things in this “burn bag”? Things that are too small or too messy to otherwise recycle? After all, I ‘ve read that cardboard tubes from toilet paper are small enough to fall through the cracks at the recycling plant. Plus we’ve all heard the stories about how dirty recyclables can contaminate an entire load… food paper products are among the hardest recyclables to get clean.

Thus, the paper price tag from a new shirt, or scraps of wool from Greta’s needlepoint, and the messy pizza boxes everyone tells you not to recycle all seemed like good fodder for fire starting, and solved a problem for me in the No Garbage department.

Next, I wondered, could I add wax paper- such as butter wrappers? In the composting community there is much debate about the compostability of wax paper, and till this point I’d been cutting my wax wrappers into strips before adding them to our compost pile to aid in their decomposition- not a task that I enjoy tremendously, mind you. I was reminded that wax paper is usually made with paraffin wax, which is petroleum based. Uh-oh. Plastic is petroleum based. Did that mean burning wax paper would be as bad as… burning a piece of plastic? As I’d already learned when researching garbage incineration, burning plastic releases all kinds of bad stuff: hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, dioxins, furans and heavy metals which can cause cancer, respiratory problems and possibly some forms of reality television.

So I looked up “burning paraffin” and it turns out that not only are butter wrappers made of paraffin wax, but most candles are too. In fact, there is a whole slew of blog posts out there devoted to warning you about the air-quality dangers of burning candles in your house. I had no idea.

But— and I felt stupid wondering this— the wax of the candle doesn’t actually burn, does it? It’s just the wick… right? Then again, what about “drip-less” candles? Where did I think the wax went?

Well you know, I never really thought about it.

Thanks to the National Candle Association website I now have a slightly better understanding of the physics and chemistry of a candle, and I understand that yes, candle wax does burn, along with the wick, just in a less obvious way. According to the NCA, the heat of the candlewick burning causes nearby wax to melt and become liquid. The liquid wax then is heated further and consequently turns into a gas, which breaks down into its constituent parts of hydrogen and carbon. When these hydrogen and carbon molecules react with oxygen: voila! You get heat, light, water vapor (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2).

Water vapor and carbon dioxide? No heavy metals or furans? So far that sounds pretty… much… okay?

But whether or not paraffin candles are okay depends a whole lot on who you are talking to. A much-cited and disputed study in 2009 at South Carolina State University showed that, over the course of burning for six hours, burning paraffin wax released cancer-causing chemicals. On the other hand, a European study published in 2018 found that if candles are burned for one hour there were no significant traces of cancer-causing chemicals. So there’s debate.

Everyone, however, seems to agree on two things: first, that avoiding paraffin wax helps. Beeswax or soy candles generally do not emit “unwanted chemicals” into the air, so they are a less toxic way to go. Second, that burning anything indoors will negatively affect air quality to some degree, creating particulate matter (PM) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). But then again, so does lighting a match or cooking dinner.

The answer to my original question seemed to be no: even though plastic and paraffin wax are both petroleum products, burning paraffin wax paper didn’t seem any worse than burning a regular piece of paper.

But Wait

So I can burn my butter wrappers in peace. Phew, right? Except I’m afraid this brought me to the doorstep of an even larger and more uncomfortable question, one that I’ve been studiously trying to avoid till now, and here it is:

“to burn or not to burn?”

If I wanted to be chicken about it, I could say this question is beyond my purview. After all, our project this year is very intentionally specific and literal: not to throw anything away. As long as we don’t produce anything evil or harmful we can skirt the question and say, carbon footprint or no, we’ve abided by the rules. Just a little burn pile here! Don’t mind us!

But I don’t want to be chicken, so I’m gonna ask: If burning anything at all releases carbon dioxide, and too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a major cause of global warming, is burning anything okay? Anything at all, ever? I mean, whether it’s coal or propane or wood or paper or butter wrappers, you’re still releasing carbon dioxide into the air, right?

So let’s look at it.

Is ANY Kind Of Burning Okay?

We burn things for lots of reasons: to get rid of things, to cook food, to celebrate, to stay warm. I suppose one might reason that burning fuel to heat our homes is something we need, making it ethically acceptable, whereas having a campfire or bonfire is “just for fun,” and therefore something we don’t need and thereby not as acceptable.

This thought led me to another question: in terms of carbon footprint, how does heating my house actually compare to our nighttime campfire? Looking it up I find that the average Vermont home uses 700 gallons of heating oil annually, producing 16,800 pounds of carbon dioxide, per house. It’s hard to find statistics about how much carbon dioxide is produced by the average campfire, but the highly questionable source of a Reddit thread suggested that a campfire consisting of 22 pounds of wood might release about 21 pounds of carbon dioxide. Assuming this is true, and saying at our house we have perhaps two campfires per week all summer long- equaling 32 campfires; this would mean releasing maybe 672 pounds of CO2 annually… 4% of the amount used to heat the average Vermont home for a year.

Admittedly, these numbers are wildly sketchy, but I’m trying to get a relative handle on something here and even very inexact numbers like these can help. Because what this information tells me is that I’m focusing on the wrong things. If our annual campfire carbon dioxide output is such a tiny fraction of that of our heating oil, I shouldn’t be worrying about the campfires; I should be worrying about the heating oil. It’s like being scared of a mouse and failing to notice there’s also a rabid, drooling hyena in the room. With a machete.

I think it’s human nature to want to focus on the things we feel we have greater control over and can change more easily— I will change the planet by buying a different dish sponge! — but the danger is that when we focus on the manageable we may do so at the expense of the big picture. Maybe it makes more sense to keep the frivolous, the things we don’t “need” and rethink the essentials, instead. So I’m keeping campfires.

But I’m going to research a better way to heat my house.

Postscript

Life involves carbon dioxide. We breathe it out all day long, every day, all our lives. I suppose if we really want to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions we could all just jump off the nearest bridge, but I have no intention of doing that. Instead, I’d rather manage my life and activities thoughtfully. What do I want to spend my carbon dioxide on? In the grand scheme of things, what’s worthwhile, and what isn’t?

In 1991 the environmental thinker, Dartmouth professor Donella Meadows responded to criticism about the college’s annual homecoming bonfire, which was being decried by some students as polluting and wasteful. She said:

Nature can handle bonfires. Nature makes bonfires all the time…The environmental lesson in a bonfire is not that it’s wasteful or polluting, but that, if human beings don’t curb their wastefulness and their penchant for constant expansion, there will come a time when the planet will provide neither the sources nor the sinks for bonfires.

She pointed out an example of a place where this is already happening: Los Angeles, which due to air pollution even back in 1991 had “190 days each year when it’s not safe to breathe.”

A lot has changed in the three decades of climate struggle since Meadows wrote this, but I think her words still make sense. When I looked it up, I was happy to see that the bonfire tradition at Dartmouth survives to this day. Humans have long gathered around the fireside and I’m not quite ready to give that up just yet. There will certainly be those who disagree with me on this, who feel no concession is not worth it to make their carbon footprint ever smaller, who feel that once you justify campfires in the name of fun you can justify almost anything else too, and they will have a point. But the fact is that as humans we can never eliminate our impact entirely. There is always going to be a line drawn, and the question is where that line goes.

Being a good citizen of the world right now means we have to change the way we think about things, the way we do things, but – as I learned during our Year of No Sugar- nothing is sustainable if it feels like a series of endless deprivations. Just as much as we still need to breathe, we still need joy.

And marshmallows. If all else fails we can feed them to the rabid hyena.