It's Easy Being Green

This week our car decided it wasn’t going to start on a very random basis.  We had been out running errands all morning and decided to stop at Sam’s Club and stock up on our usual grocery staples like milk, eggs and bread.  When we got back out to the car 20 minutes later it acted like the battery was dead.  Perhaps it was karma coming back to bite me after I muttered a profanity at all the people fighting over who was in line at the only two check stands open.  After munching on fresh fruit and potato chips in the parking lot for half an hour, our roadside assistance showed up and jump started our car.  Home we went!

Once we pulled in, I turned off the car to see if it would restart.  As luck would have it, dead again.  I had a co-worker pick me up for the ride into town and I schlepped my battery to the auto parts store.  It tested ok (as it should since it was only a few months old) and they informed me it must be my alternator.  Fantastic!  I knew I was either looking at a very long weekend and close to $300 for one silly part or about $600 to have a mechanic do it for me.  I guess I was in vapor lock mode.  My girlfriend and I decided we would tackle the alternator together making the experience more fun with the two of us at each other’s side.  Four hours later we were steaming hot mad and hadn’t removed a single damn part.

We finally decided we were defeated and that the car was going to have be towed to a mechanic where we would shell out the insane amount of money to have a mechanic do it for us.  I reconnected the battery cables and thought why don’t I just try starting the car.  I did and it started.  We let it run for about 30 minutes while we got ready to head into town, not wanting to shut it off again until we got to the auto parts store.  We pulled into the parking lot and the helpful clerks tested our electrical system.  Their tests showed everything was fine.  The battery was great and the alternator was putting out plenty of juice so they told me to clean up the cables and battery posts.

We did just that and it only cost us $4.00 as opposed to at least $300.  We bought a battery terminal brush, mixed up a quick concoction of 1 cup warm water and 1 tablespoon of baking soda, grabbed the vaseline and headed to the garage.  As it turns out, making sure your battery has a good electrical connection is super easy and takes just a few minutes.  First, disconnect the negative battery cable from the terminal and set aside.  Next, disconnect the positive cable.  With a paint brush, wipe on some of the baking soda solution.  As it comes in contact with the battery acid buildup it will bubble and sizzle.  This is a natural reaction so don’t get worried.  After you let the backing soda neutralize all that buildup, wipe it off with a clean towel.  Apply the baking soda solution to the wire rings that clamp to the battery posts and wipe clean.  Use the battery terminal brush to help scrape the extra stuff off both the clamps and the posts of your battery.  Once you’ve cleaned all the surfaces, reattach the positive cable and then the negative cable to your battery.  It’s that simple!

I also ready many anecdotes involving pennies.  Supposedly if you place a copper penny near each battery post it will attract the corrosion from the battery acid to the coin as opposed to the posts and cables.  I haven’t tried that but I guess it couldn’t hurt.  What a weekend!  We grew together as a couple once more after getting seriously frustrated with our weekend’s car repair.  I guess we were technically successful though since the car is running again!

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The house we’ve been renting for the past six months has apparently been sold or at least there is now a contract pending on the place. That means once again we must pack our lives back up and move to the next place that will hold us and our possessions for another six months when my current contract expires and the possibility of moving to another place with more stability exists. In the meantime, I’ve been wading through some of the stuff that has collected around here: old vacuum (wasn’t sucking very good so we bought a new one), old DVD player (we won a new one at a company party so we don’t really need another) and an old computer tower, the result of a family member’s upgrade.

While it’s simple to chuck these items into your garbage bin and let the landfill take hold of it, it’s not an environmentally sound idea. Electronic waste or “e-waste” for short, is a growing problem and it’s only getting worse. In fact, some estimates now say that 75% of old electronics are just sitting in storage. We know they shouldn’t go into the landfills and contaminate our groundwater and soils but at the same time we’re not really sure what to do with them.

Luckily there are several ways you can put your old items to a better use and perhaps give someone else the opportunity to have a job or learn a new skill set by repairing and fixing these items. Or there just might be someone else who can use what you don’t want anymore. Freecycle is a great way to get rid of things you have just cluttering up the house. Why spend all the time running a garage sale for a few bucks when you can just give something away? Maybe there’s something you could really use but just don’t have the cash in your budget for it. Take a gander at your local Freecycle and see what’s happening. I use my local group all the time both for giving things away and picking up something I really need.

Here in Arizona, I just stumbled across a website setup by the Arizona Environmental Strategic Alliance and ADEQ. The website, Reuseaz, allows people to post just about anything that could be used again instead of just throwing it away. It doesn’t look like it gets much usage right now, which is a shame. Maybe we can all change that! Also, if you live in Arizona and have an old computer that needs to disappear why not think about donating the unit to the Strut Program. Strut takes the old computers and trains high school students on A+ computer repairs and teaches them skills necessary to enter the workforce. Plus, once the computers are fixed by the students they’re then donated to needy schools and families who don’t have computers. That’s a great way to make something old, new again!

But, before you donate anything with a hard drive on it, you need to think about protecting the data that is stored deep in that hard drive’s recesses.  Remember you may have deleted information or cleared off that hard drive but it’s not enough to protect you.  Pretty much any information on a hard drive is recoverable because it never fully disappears.  Check out Talina’s blog post on “Protecting Your Identity” when it comes to hard drives.  Then, you can donate your computer!

Do you know of a program that relates to these three? Post it here and give us a link so we can all check it out and keep these things out of our landfills.

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Would you like to take a few simple steps to make sure your Super Bowl party is a little friendlier on our environment? Well you can and it’s pretty darn simple just by choosing a few key products that help us all tread a little lighter on our planet. I’m not talking a smörgåsbord of vegan food with a bicycle powered television pumping out the highlights of the game either!

Every Super Bowl party will inevitably have beer. So why not go the sustainable route and pick some beer that’s not only tasty but eco-friendly. New Belgium brewing company, brewers of Fat Tire and a variety of other lip-smacking good beers take pride in helping out our environment. The all employee owned company runs its brewery off of wind power and even takes extra steps like turning the steam generated in the brewing process into even more electricity. I’ve also heard they compost their leftover grains and hops. Frog’s Leap Wine is a great choice if you’d like to sport a little vino in your red plastic cup. The winery uses organic grapes and water-saving farming methods. They’re also 100% solar powered.

But what about chips you say? Pick up some bags of Kettle brand chips. The Salem, Oregon snack food company has restored damaged wetlands at their corporate headquarters where blue herons have now returned en masse. They also operate one of the largest commercial solar power arrays in the Pacific Northwest, saving 65 tons of CO2 every year and they buy wind power for the rest of their electrical needs. Agricultural waste left over in the potato chip process is turned into animal feed or compost and their used cooking oil is turned into bio-diesel, powering a fleet of company cars. That’s pretty cool!

Maybe you need some plain yogurt to make dips. Stonyfield Farms, a New Hampshire based company, supports many organic farms. They have a tree planting program to offset their CO2 emissions and they give 10% of their profit away to environmental causes every year. That amounts to about $3 Million dollars in donations every year.

Want dessert? Try some pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Though they’ve been bought out by Unilever, the company is still doing good. They donate about $1 Million annually and donate to local community projects. The company started an alliance for dairy farmers. It’s a way to keep them in business while improving their environmental practices.

If you need some pre or post game enery, try a Clif Bar. The company’s products are certified organic and are packaged in recycled goods. They moved a bakery near a distribution center to reduce greenhouse gasses, their employees get paid for volunteering in the community and they can get money toward the purchase of a hybrid or bio-diesel vehicle.

Last but not least, when it comes time to cleanup, you can use environmentally friendly cleaners made by Seventh Generation. I’ve talked about the company before. You can read their benefits on the environment and look into other green cleaners by checking out this blog post. Simple steps and easy products to make your gathering greener.

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