It's Easy Being Green

I’ve often referred to Phoenix as a cultural vacuum. I was born and raised in that city and every time I go back I sometimes shudder. Now I’m not so worried about the lack of culture in Phoenix but the lack of compassion and care for our environment. Everything in Phoenix is all about waste. The soccer moms driving Hummers and SUV’s speeding down the highway burning oil like it’s going out of style. Lush green yards and sprawling golf courses in a desert that only gets a few inches of rain every year. It’s all waste and it’s hard to look at when you spend so much time trying to green up your own life more than one hundred miles away.

A couple weeks ago we stopped at the Desert Ridge Marketplace in the north Phoenix/Scottsdale area and were shocked about the waste that was put on display for everyone there. In the middle of the food court was a roaring gas fireplace. The thing must have been about five or six feet wide and probably 15 feet long. The sun was shining and the temperature was in the upper 80’s, maybe even close to 90. There was absolutely no need for a fire to be roaring that afternoon, burning natural gas as if it was coming from a limitless supply! The scary thing was, there were people from Scottsdale just parking themselves in front of the fireplace complaining about how cold it was. Give me a break! Go stand in the sun for a moment, it’s almost 90 degrees!

As if that wasn’t bad enough, just ten feet away people were dining on the patio of a restaurant that had an entire bank of a misting system running non-stop. I’m not sure about anyone else but 80 to 90 degrees, in the dry desert of Phoenix, is actually a very comfortable temperature. It’s not too hot, not too cold. People just don’t blink an eye in Phoenix at those types of situations. Places like Phoenix are going to be the first cities that run out of water and are going to be looking to everyone else for help and a bailout. We have to live smarter than that regardless of whether or not you have thousands of dollars to drop in a swanky shopping mall and silicone implants in your chest that are making you cold.

Just to prove how nonchalant the Phoenix metro populous can be, check out the latest cover of the Phoenix New Times. A giant green f-you is emblazoned across the cover with the title “Green Fatigue: Is anyone else tired of eco-chic?” While the article might discuss ways to live a greener life, who would even bother picking it up with a message like that? There’s another hundred thousand pounds of paper going to waste!

Have you seen wastefulness in your city or some place you were visiting? Tell us about it and share your thoughts on it!

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Clothing manufacturer Patagonia has made another interesting move, showcasing their social responsibility to our planet.  The company just launched a new website called The Footprint Chronicles.  The interactive website allows people  to see the good and bad affects of manufacturing the clothes they buy like Synchilla fleece vests and rain shells.  In a press release about the new website, Patagonia company officials said they’re determined to be candid and forthright about its impact on the environment and created the site to encourage dialog with customers who are concerned about the environment.  Five new products will be added to the site on Earth Day 2008.  The site showcases more than 35 filmed interviews and slide shows of factory workers, owners, designers and third party auditors.

Patagonia has increasingly tried to become a more environmentally responsible company.  Since 1996 they’ve used only organic cotton in their outdoor clothing line.  Just recently the company also launched their synthetic fiber-to-fiber recycling program.  Patagonia takes back worn-out polyster and nylon clothing and recycles it, making it into new clothing.  The process forever captures the raw materials used in making virgin fibers.

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There are thousands of sites spread across our globe where groundwater supplies have been contaminated due to dirty factories, military installations and the dumping of toxic waste.  These so-called superfund sites are left to sit until the expensive cleanup operation can get underway and have undoubtedly a harmful impact on our environment and supplies of drinking water.  But one scientist at Rice University has come up with an amazing solution, one that could leave at least part of our planet gleaming!

Chemical engineer Michael Wong developed a gold detergent that is amazing effective at cleaning up water contaminated with toxic waste.  No, this isn’t a hundred dollar bottle of soap that the likes of Paris Hilton would bathe in twice daily!  Typically cleanup of these sites containing the cancer causing chemicals TCE and PCE costs millions of dollars and it never really gets rid of the problem.  TCE is an industrial solvent used to clean greasy machinery and while it smells sweet, the after-affects are anything but.  The current cleanup method is simply a process that moves the chemicals to another spot.  The federal government has suggested that just to clean up the 1,400 military sites would cost $5 Billion.

Wong realized he could combine gold particles (molecule sized) with palladium (another metal) and sprinkle the resulting mixture over contaminated water.  What happened was pure genius!  The gold detergent broke down the TCE and PCE and turned them into a more eco-friendly gas, ethane, and chloride salt.  The gold detergent works about 100 times faster than the current groundwater cleanup method which involves pumping water through charcoal filters to remove the TCE and PCE.  Wong and his partners at Rice will now deploy the system at an actual cleanup site to see just how effective and cost-efficient their gold detergent can be.

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A new study out this week is showing that the post-Christmas rush to spend gift cards is apparently non-existent. It’s a sign that everyone is dealing with a continually weakening economy. Our nation’s biggest retailer, Wal-Mart, has been closely watching the way people have been spending their holiday gift cards this month. It turns out people are either holding on to them and saving them for harder times or they’re spending them on basic necessities.

Wal-Mart has indicated that most gift card purchases in their store are going toward food staples like pasta, cereal and canned goods. Even other major retailers are seeing similar trends. Upscale clothing retailers are seeing more people spending their gift cards on socks and underwear then on that new $100 pair of jeans. People are walking right past those plasma screen TV’s, video games, CD’s and other superficial items and picking up the necessities.

This sign doesn’t make me worried. I feel like we’re in a good position to weather a recession should our country really slump into one. We are always stocked up on the basic food items and are continuously looking ahead. What do we need and what do we really need to not spend the money on? One thing we could do better is save. It’s hard right now at this point in our life to really shunt money away into another account. Our retirement savings has been underway for the last 5 years now and we do have about $2,000 in a savings account that never moves. But, I still don’t think that’s enough and would like to have a bigger pad.

In the meantime, I think this latest economic trend shows consumers finally realizing what’s important and what isn’t. You need the basics to live. All the rest are just accessories of our lives that for some wild reason, we feel like we need to drag around with us. I’m glad we’re getting a bit of a reality check. I don’t think our nation has really had to scrimp or save for awhile. While I’d like to think it will get people into the habit of planning financially and making hard decision on what they need and what they don’t, I know it will just return to the same old consumer economy a few years down the road.

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If you haven’t already read my post below on the Mortgage Meltdown and Credit Crisis you should.  This is an illustration of what amazes me about American’s current financial status and the desire for more.  We were watching TV this morning and an ad came on for “cashcall.com”.  They were advertising small consumer loans, presumably to pay your house payment or other items you’ve already fallen behind on like bills and stuff.  Then, the fine print pops up for less than one second at the end of the commercial.  I was able to freeze frame it thanks to my DVR and took a picture using the digital camera:

It’s a little hard to read but let me break it down for you.  The fine print says a typical loan of $2,600 has an APR of 99.25% with 42 months of payments at $216.55 per month with a $75 origination fee.  If you break that down, you’re paying $10,070.00 for the whole loan spread over three and a half years.  That means you paid $6,495.00 in interest alone on a $2,600 loan.  That also assumes you don’t make a late payment or get hit with other fees in the process.  What a bunch of crooks!  I hope consumers steer far away from companies like this!

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You’d have to be like an ostrich with its head stuck in the sand if you haven’t heard one bit about the current state of our economy. Houses are foreclosing at record rates, new homes aren’t selling and there’s already an 8 month glut of unsold homes sitting on the market. Add to that the staggering amount of debt a lot of Americans are carrying around and the situation begins to take on some epic proportions.

I just finished watching an interesting documentary called “Maxxed Out“. While I was unsure about it during the first ten minutes, it actually turned into a pretty interesting piece looking at the real impacts of our love for credit. The impacts are extremely sad and disheartening and your left feeling like everyone is just preying on people, waiting to make a quick buck off of them. How did we ever get to that point where people became so engrossed with greed that they will absolutely crush the people underneath them to better themselves? Some would say it’s simply survival of the fittest. Luckily, I’ve never been too wrapped up in the rat race. I was for a time but quickly had a thought about two years ago that it just really wasn’t worth it. I’ve now paid off debts and am in the process of cleaning up my credit. We want to be able to bite while the housing market is down over the next year and get us into a home, so we can finally stop throwing money down the drain in rent every month.

Our government now wants to toss several hundred dollars at each of us so we can go out and “spur the economy”. While I’m honestly not going to sneeze at an $800 check headed my way from the federal government, I’m also not going to go spend it willy nilly like our President and representatives would like me too. Do we really need that new plasma screen TV? No! What you need is to spend more time with your family, get out and enjoy the fresh air or do something good for yourself and our environment. I’m hoping that most Americans will use the money to pay off a debt or throw into their savings account. I know how difficult it is to achieve that financial goal of 3 months worth of pay sitting in your savings account in case of emergency. This just makes it even easier to get there. If you can save 10% of your paycheck, in just a year you will be close to having one month’s worth of pay saved up. That’s not too hard, especially when you add in the “economic incentive” check that will show up in your mailbox.

I know people who just aren’t being smart right now, who still think they’re going to make a mint off someone else. That’s just not going to happen and people really need to buckle down, analyze their spending and be smart about what their paying for. The feds just cut another key interest rate by 0.75% so now would be the time to look at refinancing major purchases like homes and cars. Haggle with your credit card companies to see if you can get a lower APR and save yourself some money on all those interest payments. There’s a lot of websites out there that can help you shop for better deals in the banking system like Finance Genius. If you shop around, you could potentially save yourself hundreds if not thousands of dollars in finance charges and interest. Do something good for yourself in 2008 and become financially fit.

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The NOAA is predicting a warmer and drier winter than normal this year. That might sound like music to many people’s ears considering the high cost of heating oil and natural gas. But, with those prices on the rise too, it will quickly outweigh the benefit of using your heater less. Here in Arizona the Corporation Commission, which is in charge of governing the state utilities, says they’re actively trying to lower the cost we pay for natural gas. However, they add it’s unsafe to consider alternative heat sources like wood stoves and wood pellet stoves. They say it’s a fire risk and I just can’t imagine why a state commission charged with regulating the local utilities would make a statement like that. Maybe it’s because their pockets are lined with the dollars from the state utilities!

Regardless of whether there’s any real under the table deal making going on between the Arizona Corporation Commission and the utilities, the group is obviously going to protect the utility companies. It’s not a shocker that they would try to steer you away from cheaper, alternative methods to heat your home. I can tell you first hand that our wood stove does a damn fine job of warming up our humble home at night. In fact, our thermostat regularly reads a balmy 72 degrees while we have a fire going.

I know many people who plunk down about $160 for a cord of juniper or oak firewood as their primary heat source. In Northern Arizona, that cord will usually get them through the winter just fine. Imagine, $160 to heat your home for the winter months compared to probably around $50 to $150 a month to heat your home with natural gas. Now which seems more economical? Maybe that price tag is too much for you to shell out at once. In the Coconino National Forest, you can get your own wood cutting permits starting at $20. The permit is good forest-wide so you can harvest dead and downed wood and you’re doing your part to help cleanup the forest and prevent devastating fires. Or, if you’re willing to drive a bit out of your way you can get a free wood permit. There are a few areas on the forest that are overflowing with dead trees, ready to be cut. Secure the permit and you’re on your way to a free firewood extravaganza and you can feel good about the work you’re doing, helping to protect the forest from a massive wildfire.

Many people out there bock at the amount of work involved with cutting your own firewood and splitting it. I look at it of more of a way to connect with the past and learn techniques that will help me get through this world if anything terrible ever happens. What are you going to do when we have an oil shortage and you can’t run that $2,000 gas powered wood splitter? If you’re like me, you learn how to do it by hand with tools that don’t require gas or electricity to run…just good ‘ol fashioned manpower! I found that splitting wood by hand is a great cardio workout and it really builds your arms and chest too. Online, I’ve found several great hand tools that are similar to one I borrowed from a friend and used to split my wood.

There’s the Super Firewood Splitter , the Easy Motion Splitter, and the Wicko Super Spear Splitter. All of these will save your back from the swing of a maul or sledge and potentially offer you more splitting force. It requires nothing more than some calories to burn and some yearly lubing to keep it splitting smoothly!

If you don’t know much about using wood for your heat, head over to one of my favorite resources, Mother Earth News. It’s a great magazine that teaches you the ins and outs of sustainable living and homesteading. Their online article archive is a great tool for anything on the subject of sustainable living. They also have a great article in the archive called A Connoisseurs Guide to Fuelwood. It will tell you just about everything you need to know!

Let me know how you heat your home and any tips on alternative heat sources you might have.  Do you have a special wood splitter or tool that you’ve found works really well?  Let me know!

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