Challenge 10: The hour is upon us

You’ve changed your light bulbs, reduced the meat in your diet, installed a low-flow showerhead, taken toxic cleaners to the hazardous waste depot and tried all the other challenges Catherine and I have set out since mid-January.
Now what?
This is the 10th and final challenge for our Green Life blog. We trust, though, that it’s just the start as you do what you can to reduce your environmental footprint.
This week, we’re proposing three more steps to turn an end into a beginning.
First, since this is Earth Hour day, the initial challenge is to turn out your lights, and anything else electric that you can safely do without, between 8 and 9 this evening.
You’ll be part of a worldwide movement that has gained remarkable momentum, particularly in Canada and Australia — where the event was launched last year.
Earth Hour is all about education and changing behaviour but, what the heck, contests are fun and why shouldn’t Toronto and the rest of the GTA achieve a bigger drop in electricity use than anywhere else.
Hundreds of governments and businesses say they’ll participate. But the consumption meters won’t fall very far, and the photos won’t be truly memorable, unless plenty of homeowners, condo dwellers and apartment residents flick some switches, too.
Second, since Earth Hour isn’t just about 60 minutes of near darkness, the next part of the challenge is to keep on keeping on with the previous green moves, and the 71 daily tips we’ve posted on thestar.com.
Some cynics scoff at this evening’s event or argue it’s the wrong approach. It’s certainly not the only way to encourage greener lives, and it can’t be enough on its own to prevent climate change and other environmental problems from reaching calamitous proportions. Government measures — things like tough regulations and substantial carbon taxes — are essential, as are new technologies and ways of doing business.
But experience shows that people who try to make improvements get angry with politicians who don’t, and it’s amazing how often politicians develop backbones when they believe their jobs are at risk.
The enthusiastic response to Earth Hour does suggest that many of us are concerned about environment issues and that the event is a great way to widen awareness. It will be a success, though, only if it helps to lead to widespread and permanent steps toward conservation.
We’ve tried to provide a good starting point, and there are vast amounts of information available to keep you going. Two good starting points are WWF-Canada’s Good Life web site and Weconserve, a project of the Conservation Council of Ontario.
Mostly it’s a matter of being conscious of the fact that electricity, no matter how cheap or under priced, is never free. From wind turbines to smoke-spewing coal-fired generating stations, every source has impacts.
The same goes for other resources: The more we use, the more damage we cause. There is no need to starve, freeze, swelter or grope in the dark: We simply need to live wiser and smarter.
Which brings us to the final part of our final challenge: Learn about the environment and make yourself heard. Whether it’s joining or supporting a group; talking to friends and neighbours; helping with a school project; contacting politicians or businesses — involve yourself.
We won't endorse any particular group, or suggest what message you should send to whom. As journalists, we’ve already ventured far enough into advocacy.
The bottom line: Simply become alive to issues that will determine the fate of our planet. To be blunt: Nothing that we do as individuals, on our own, will be enough to avert the climate-change crisis just as it would make virtually no difference to the global outcome if Canada were to immediately stop using fossil fuels. On the other hand, nothing at the essential bigger scale will happen unless people who can do something actually act and create pressure, and examples, for others to follow.
There’s still plenty of resistance to change and differences of opinion have been the order of the day in the responses to our blog.
When we suggested finding substitutes for plastic, and increasing recycling, we got an earful from Dave who objected to the city’s instruction to rinse items before tossing them in the bin. “It’s garbage. Garbage. Garbage,” he wrote. “Life is short enough. Now I have to spend time cleaning my garbage. It’s garbage. Garbage.”
Some of you expressed frustration at attempts to go greener. It can be tough to find a parking spot at GO train stations.
“Oh, ouch,” wrote Nancy, after the “Bye flight” challenge to restrict air travel and its hefty carbon emissions. “I’m finally at the age when I can afford global travel every year or so and now don’t know if my conscience will let me. My timing sucks!”
The call to go meatless for a day also produced objections. “Come on! This is another example of going way too far, at the risk of turning people off,” wrote Anne-Marie Demers. “Are you also going to suggest not having children at all, like I saw on another web site?”
Quite a few of you, in fact, have concluded that the only hope lies in population control. We didn’t pursue that debate since, while it’s true that fewer people would mean less stress on Earth’s environment, it’s an idea that’s virtually impossible to turn into a politically and socially acceptable policy. People will have to decide as individuals how many kids to have, and why.
Mostly, you’ve demonstrated understanding and thoughtfulness, and a willingness to try different things. Some of you embrace new technologies: Others look back to the future, to power-free gizmos like the “sidewalk strider” as an alternative to the treadmill.
Either way, it seems a lot of people are ready for change. We heard from many like Annie, who wrote: “Wow, this is great information ..... Great stuff! Thank you so much.”

Comment from Texas

We have changed out ALL our light bulbs, only use one light at a time in room we are in, have put pvc pipes on washer to collect water from washer for re using, have rain barrels all around house to collect rain water for re use ( 8 barrels now around house), have 2 gallon buckets in both bathrooms and kitchen to collect water from fauchets and shower while waiting for water to warm up, was amazing when we discovered how much water was being wasted waiting for it to warm up to use, have changed out most all our landscaping to plants that dont even require much water, use our microwave for most all cooking now, do have fireplace big enough to cook in and do sometimes, is 56 inches wide, have purchased our own cloth shopping bags and stopped getting plastic ones, have changed out commodes with all new tank equipment to cut down water usuage, installed low water usuage shower, do turn off our computers at night ( 2 of them) use ceiling fans and open windows for most of year,
installed new ac duct work, new insulation, and even in hottest parts of summer, rarely have to turn on ac, and it does get hot in Texas, but, we stay cool here in hill country, our electric bill had dropped to just under $100.00 a MONTH, even in worst heat times here. ! our water bill is usually around $35.00 a month now, but, that also includes a light the electric company puts in , and garbage too..as for garbage, now, how to be able to stop using those plastic bags in garbage cans ? and how to find products, tooth paste, paper towels, toilet paper other household stuff wrapped in plastic ? even meats we buy, is wrapped in plastic..why ? so many products we use around house, all in plastic covers, seems like must be better way..soooo, what else can we do to keep going green, have also stopped driving , I drive very little, only to Dr's, rarely, on once a week shopping, husband commutes with others to work, we ARE looking for any other ways we can change..any info would
be appreciated..
  Thanks so much for your site, have forwarded it to all our family and friends, who will all be taking part in the lights out on March 29th..
  Sincerely,
  Claudine Bradshaw
  Bandera Texas

Green Baby

So, you won't be hearing for me for a while. Today is my last day at The Star for a year. I'm baby-bound, and we're talking big, big baby at this point. I have officially run out of clothes that fit me. I'm well past the cute-pregnant stage and deep into the If-You-Don't-Give-Me-A-Seat-on-the-Subway-This-Morning-I'm-Going-to-Blubber stage. D-day is 8 days and counting, setting me neatly in a hospital room around 8 p.m. on March 29. I don't relish the idea of giving birth in the dark, but hey, I'm committed. I may just give birth to the city's first Earth Hour Baby.

For the next year, you can think of me elbow-deep in soiled cloth diapers, perfecting the "shush" and dreaming about drinking VQA wine (what they don't tell you when you first get pregnant, is that you are cut off from booze not just for the nine months while the baby is inside, but for months afterwards, while you are breastfeeding). If you see a woman with circles under her eyes standing transfixed before a table at your local farmers market, come introduce yourself.
Until then, keep binding those eco-feet.

All the best,
Catherine

Challenge 10: Greening your Workplace

So, you’ve taken all your toxic cleaning products to the depot, switched all your lights to compact fluorescents and started to hang up your laundry instead of using the power-hungry dryer at home. But then, when you get to work, the bathroom sparkles with chemicals, the lights and computers have been left running all night and the only cups available in the cafeteria are made of Styrofoam.
No wonder many of us feel like a split personality between David Suzuki and a private Airbus-flying Saudi prince, the green version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
So, it’s time to turn our green eyes to the office.

Challenge: Make one green change at your workplace.

The Motivation: Most of us spend more time at work than we do at home. Shouldn’t our offices then reflect our environmental ideals? If you recycle at home, why wouldn’t you expect to do it at work, where you spend twice the waking hours?
Plus, when it comes to combating climate change, that’s where we can make more headway. In Toronto, more carbon emissions spew from industrial and commercial buildings than they do from residences, according to a recent report by the Toronto Atmospheric Fund.
Think about it this way: if you change all the light bulbs in your home from incandescents to compact fluorescents, you might save about 800 kilowatt hours — just under a month’s worth of your home’s electricity. But, if you get just one floor of a downtown office building to turn off its lights at night, that could mean 24,000 fewer kilowatt-hours of electricity — enough to power 20 homes for the entire year!
Plus, you might just then convince all the people who work there to start lighting down at home….

Process: Choose one thing you can realistically change. Make is something you are passionate about. Here, at The Star, a colleague got infuriated at all the paper being unnecessarily printed. So, he printed up the instructions on how to set the computer to double-print documents, and posted it above a popular printer. Now, more than a dozen reporters have changed their printing ways….
Some examples of campaigns you could launch (these are all things we are looking to implement at The Star, but Peter will write about that later):

1. Reduce your workplace’s office paper use – by setting all your photocopiers and printers to print double-sided by default. If they are older models without that option, set up a system where used paper is stocked back in the machines for a second use. If you workplace uses virgin tree pulp paper, try to convert them to stock paper with at least 30 percent recycled content – saving not only trees, but energy and water. If you are worried about quality, note the U.S. government has printed exclusively on the stuff for almost 10 years. The Seattle city government uses only 100 per cent recycled paper and reduced their paper use by 21 per cent to pay for the difference.  To see how many trees your workplace could save, check out The Paper Calculator.
2. Computer down. When you leave at night, turn off your computer. And get your colleagues to do the same. Make it a policy. Just by doing that, you’ll cut every computer’s electricity use by a quarter.
3. Light down. Do you work in one of those buildings where the lights glow 24 hours a day? If so, can you find out who controls the off switch and convince him/her to flip it at night? If not, can you convince him to change the lighting for a more energy-efficient kind? If you are lucky, and work in a place with an old-fashioned on-off switch, you could post a sticker above it reminding the last person out to flip it down.
4. De-Styrofoam your workplace. More than 8 billion disposable cups are tossed in Canada every year. Make your office an exception. One easy solution is to head to Value Village and buy all your colleagues second-hand porcelain cups for 25 cents each. Or, you can do what Toronto Community Housing did, and have special corporate coffee mugs – with lids – made for all the employees.
5. De-Auto the office. Three-quarters of Canadians drive alone to work. Set up a carpooling database for your colleagues, so they know who near them is driving to work. Or, could you reserve better parking for people who arrive with more than themselves in the car?

Most of these are easy things a company could do to make a difference. But, bureaucracy moves slowly. So be patient. Form a workplace green team to help you work on some basic goals. If get really serious, can bring in a corporate sustainability consultant to draft up plan for you.

Cost: Your time.

Savings: For the company, less electricity means less money – sometimes a lot less. It’s estimated the average bank tower could save $2 million a year by turning off the lights at night. The company will also gain improved employee morale, loyalty and a stronger public image, according to a recent report by the Society of Human Resource Managers.
For you, you’ll save your green conscience.

-- Catherine Porter

Challenge 9: Detox your Home

This week we discovered that most of us still pitch our used batteries in the trash. The problem? While household batteries make up less than 1 per cent of landfill, they’re responsible for up to 70 per cent of the heavy metals found there — nasty things like cadmium, lead and mercury, a neurotoxin that has made eating more than one serving of tuna a week tantamount to drinking nail polish.

Those are just one of the myriad of toxic substances we stock in our homes. There’s paint, paint thinners, pesticides, even our basic detergents — the things that are supposed to clean our homes!

Many of those bad things end up in the air, water or land, poisoning the wildlife and water supply.

Why would we keep them around — especially when there are non-toxic replacements that are easy to find? Sure, the science still isn't clear as the vast majority of the industrial chemicals on the Canadian market haven't been tested. But why take the chance? My 2-year old might not be hit jay walking across Bloor Street, but...

The Challenge: Get rid of all toxic cleaners in your home.

The Motivation: Indoor air pollution is now worse than the toxic brew you breathe outside. In part, that’s to blame for our skyrocketing rates of asthma and cancer.
There are thousands of industrial chemicals manufactured and sold in Canada, and only a handful have been tested for their health and environmental impacts. Many are in our cleaning products. Tilex Total Bathroom Multipurpose Cleaner, for one, contains 2-Butoxyethanol — a reproductive toxin the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry says causes birth defects in animals.
That, like other cleaning products, is made to be dissolved in water and sent down the drain. Hormone-disrupting chemicals from antibacterial soaps and cleaning agents were recently found in San Francisco Bay during a year-long study by the Environmental Working Group, an American non-profit agency. One of the chemicals, triclosan, has been shown to feminize fish. Also, when exposed to sunlight, it converts into a type of dioxin — deadliest pollutant ever made.

Process: Check under your sink and in your laundry room. You’ll find a lot of bottles with a lot of corroded hand symbols, skull and crossbones, and instructions to phone the Poison Control Centre if the product was swallowed. All of those are definitely toxic. Take them all to the nearest hazardous waste depot.

Then, you enter a trickier terrain. Health Canada doesn’t require companies to list ingredients on cleaning products. The assumption is they are used in such low doses, they're not harmful. My approach: Better safe than sorry. If they do have any ingredients listed, the basic rule of thumb is: avoid anything with an ingredient ending in “ene” or “ol”, or with “phenol,” “chlor” or “glycol” in its name.  Check out the list of cleaning products typical to most homes the Labour Environmental Alliance Society researched, checking for only eight toxic ingredients. Now imagine: there are more than 23,000 industrial chemicals in Canada, the vast majority of which have never been tested.

Next, go to health food store and stock up on eco-friendly, non-toxic replacements. Any product you have now will have a competitively-priced green equivalent — even toilet bowl cleanser. Even cheaper would be to make your own, by buying the basic all-natural cleaning ingredients: baking soda; baking power; borax; vinegar; and some essential oils. That’s all humans used for centuries before inventing synthetic chemicals, after all. 

Cost: Around $60 for new clean products. But would have had to buy replacements at some point anyway. Included in that is cost of green clean guide, like Annie Berthold-Bond’s Clean and Green:The Complete Guide to Nontoxic and Environmentally Safe Housekeeping or the newly-released Green Up Your Cleanup, by Jill Potvin Schoff.

Savings: None — except your family’s health.

-- Catherine Porter

Going green is easy

We've been offering all sorts of green tips and challenges in the weeks leading to Earth Hour.

Now you can take action thanks to a series of five Conservation Fairs to be held in various parts of Toronto during the next couple of weeks. Organized by the Conservation Council of Ontario and its Weconserve campaign, the two-hour sessions will offer 60 minutes of speed presentations -- seven, each five minutes long -- on subjects of your choice, followed by a chance to browse and chat with representatives of green groups and businesses. Topics include saving energy, naturalizing your garden, eating green and local and preventing pollution. The main message: "Going green was never easier."

Go to the Weconserve website for information.

Challenge 8 -- Bye flight

So, you and the kids are off to Disney World, Whistler or some other far-off pleasure place for March break. Or waiting at Pearson airport for the runways to be cleared.
Either way, you’ve got some hours to ponder our latest challenge.
Which is, simply, don’t do this again. Slipping the surly bonds of Earth is hard on the environment — not to mention your nerves when you spend two days of your week-long vacation embroiled in getting there and back.
The Challenge: Resolve that next year you’ll find your fun close to home instead of thousands of kilometres away.
And for this year, since it’s too late to change your plans, consider purchasing offsets to compensate for the greenhouse gas emissions your trip will add to the atmosphere.
Motivation: Air travel is a small but potent and fast-growing cause of climate change. Those turbines spew immense amounts of greenhouse gases and the impact is multiplied 2.7 times because the emissions are at high altitude.

Process: The longer-term part of the challenge is straightforward. You simply decide: No more March break flying. Instead, investigate good things to do near home.
For the short term, offsets pay for each tonne of greenhouse gas emissions your trip produces. Your cash goes to projects that cut emissions elsewhere. Offsets are controversial: They’ve been compared to the medieval indulgences that let sinners buy absolution. If you leap that philosophical hurdle, you can choose which of several offsetters to buy from.

Here's how my fellow blogger Catherine Porter described the options in a recent story on offsets:

Each company has its own method, using different data on fuel consumption, the number of seats, and the effect of the altitude. Most projects aim to avoid emissions elsewhere: Energy-efficient light bulbs in Kazakh schools will reduce fumes belched out by local coal-powered plants.
Some pay to do the same in North America, through wind farms or, in one case, a geothermal well supplying energy to a Vancouver AIDS hospice. Others aim to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by planting trees.
How do you separate good offsets from bad?
First, ask: “Would this project have happened anyway?” If your money goes toward a wind farm the government wants built, you are simply saving taxpayers money.
Are the projects verified by a third party? You don’t want to unwittingly line the pockets of some warlord in Africa. There is a gold standard for offsetting projects, developed by the World Wildlife Fund. It ensures a project does what it advertises, and doesn’t cause damage by, say, kicking people off land to plant trees.
Speaking of trees, a report by Boston’s Tufts University.says to avoid projects that plant them. “You have to ensure they’re around in perpetuity, which is pretty hard to do,” says Paul Lingl of the David Suzuki Foundation.
But there is an argument in favour of planting trees. How sure can you be that the Kazakh villagers don’t unscrew those fluorescent bulbs after the well-meaning Westerners have left? “The only known method we have today for extracting carbon from the atmosphere is planting trees,” says Ron Dembo, CEO of Toronto-based Zerofootprint. The company funds reforestation projects in British Columbia, but factors in a 25 per cent chance they’ll die. “The reality is we need to take carbon out and not just avoid (emitting) it," Dembo says.

There are many offsetters to check out, and while you’re doing the research, dig in to the types of projects they support. It’s a good education in how to reduce emissions. Check out zerofootprint, Carbon Neutral, Planetair and Carbon Zero Canada. This partial list isn't meant as a starting point, not an endorsement. Most of the offsetters offer carbon calculators.

Cost: Expect to pay around $10 per tonne of emissions. The 3,376-kilometre round trip between Toronto and Orlando emits 400 kilograms of greenhouse gases per passenger.

Savings: There’s no direct financial saving from offsets. But staying home is usually cheaper than being a jet-setter.

Those of you planning to spend March break here can designate one Green Day during the week when you can try out one or more of our previous challenges or the Star's green tip of the day, or come up with something else to reduce your footprint. Let us know what you decide and how it goes.

-- Peter Gorrie

Challenge 7: Nothing New in your Shopping Cart

Here is the story that will appear in Saturday's paper (written by me.) It's about one of my neighbours who I've written about before -- the ever-inspiring Mary-Margaret. I secretly think she's turning into too much of a media prostitute though and might have to cut her off soon. (Her two children appeared on the front page of The Saturday Star recently for a story on homework, of all things.)

Skip to the bottom, if you want to get right to the challenge.

Not counting ingestibles, this is all Mary-Margaret McMahon bought last month: stamps, heat packs for her purple, throbbing fingers, and a book on garbage she uses to teach children in schools about composting.

Her friend Karen Ingham has her beat. The only thing she purchased, shiny and new? A cane. “Does that count, since it is a medical device?” she asks in a confessional e-mail.
They’re part of a dozen east-end friends who pledged to not buy anything new for all of February.

No new dresses. No body lotion. No Valentines Day cards.

“The motto was `less stuff, more fun,’” says McMahon, a mother of two known affectionately as the “eco-witch” of her Danforth-Woodbine neighbourhood. “Consumption is terrible for the planet. All this stuff uses a lot of energy — creating it makes pollution, selling it, then using it and disposing of it. Do we really need it? Does it make us happy?”

The neighbourhood posse of mothers is part of a growing movement around the world that’s unplugging from the consumer grid. Instead of buying green, or buying recycled, they’re just not buying.

The idea started around a San Francisco dinner table three Christmases ago. After the discussion turned to how most Christmas gifts end up in the garbage, the group decided to participate in a social experiment. They would spend a year not shopping for anything new. At all. With a few obvious exceptions – food and drink, health essentials like medication, and safety musts, like new bicycle brake pads so coming to a stop didn’t mean diving for grass at every stop sign.

They called themselves `The Compact’ after the Mayflower Compact, signed by the pilgrims arriving to New England more than three centuries ago bent on building a new pure community. But that was tongue-in-cheek. What motivated most of them was the idea of living a less cluttered, more compact life. (As in trash compacter.) And contributing less to their country’s ever-growing landfills.

“It’s not easy for me to shop and feel good about it – engaging in mindless consumption,” says 27-year-old Rachel Kesel, one of the original Compacters who two years later, is still not shopping.

The idea hit an international nerve. From that dining room, the group found themselves on the Today Show and Good Morning America – deflecting criticism of their small plan as unpatriotic. And a movement was born, with new recruits joining their small on-line Yahoo group. Today, more than 8,000 people from as far as Australia and Taiwan have joined and committed to the same principles.

The idea’s appeal, says Kesel, is it's easy portability – anyone can do it. It’s also a one-stop shop for addressing global problems – sweatshop labour, climate change, deforestation, mining, she says. “People have a lot of anxiety about the future of the planet,” says Kesel, a professional dog-walker. “The compact allows you to address your own anxiety.”

Every week, Torontonians chucked more than five kilograms of garbage each in 2006. That’s not counting all the waste we recycled and composted. Over a year, that adds up to more than 280 kilograms of trash – on average – each. Across the country, each of us fill 30 green garbage bags a year with our garbage, according to Statistics Canada.

And for every garbage bin we pack, another 70 were packed to produce all that stuff we’re throwing out. That’s right: 70. A single gold wedding ring gleaming in a store window has a trail of 20 tonnes of mine waste, according to Annie Leonard.

She’s an environmental activist who spent 18 years digging through dumps and factories in places like Bangladesh and Haiti researching the international dumping of garbage for environmental groups like GreenPeace and Health Care Without Harm.

After three years of lecturing on the destructive nature of the disposable consumer culture, she condensed her talk into a 20-minute free on-line video called “The Story of Stuff” which is has become an underground hit – averaging 15,000 new views every day.

In it, Leonard shows how most stuff we buy is made to break or seem run-down and old fairly quickly, in order to keep us buying more. She calls it planned and perceived obsolescence – terms coined first by U.S. industrial designer Brooks Stevens in 1954 — and she reveals how it’s been enshrined not only in North American culture, but economic policy since the 1950s.

“It was a combination of the government and industry groups that decided to push excessive consumerism as the defining force in American culture, which includes where people gets their self-fulfillment,” Leonard says in an interview from her office in Berkeley, California.

But instead of fulfillment, North Americans are decidedly more miserable than they were 60 years ago, she says – trapped in a culture of trying to buy shiny new versions of happiness predestined to break.

Is not shopping the answer? Most compacters say it has given them more free time.
“It’s amazing how much time it takes to buy stuff,” says Judith Levine, a New York journalist who spent a year signed off not only stores, but movie theatres and restaurants for her book Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping. “You can spend three hours searching for a new printer part.”

Leonard says instead of requiring more work, her experiment with the Compact was relaxing. “I felt like I just got rid of a part-time job. I didn’t realize how draining it was to pay attention and stay engaged in the work-watch-spend treadmill. It’s exhausting,” says Leonard, who lives in a neighbourhood that shares ladders, yard equipment and even a pick-up truck.

Many say the unexpected benefit was feeling more connected to a community.
Less time shopping means more time in parks and libraries. It also means more borrowing, which requires getting to know your neighbours.

McMahon’s experiment proved exactly that, she said. She wanted a toilet seat for a presentation on recycled toilet paper. She put out an e-mail to her group of friends and voilà, she had two. When one member of the group needed special cake pans for a photo shoot, they were offered up by a neighbour. A request went out for Velcro stickers. Sure enough, they arrived.

“None of us are deprived. We’re living very well,” says Kesel, who sports second-hand rain gear for her wetter walks. “You can even find an iPhone used now. The fact that people are throwing things out at such a rapid rate is one of the reasons we found we could do this.”
There are times you have to get creative, she admits. For McMahon, it was a birthday party her 10-year-old son Liam was invited to. Instead of buying a present, she baked a lemon-poppy seed cake, the birthday boy’s favourite. And she sent along vouchers for nine others like it.

Next year, she hopes to convince her posse to extend the consumer fast to a whole season or even six months.

“It’s made all of us more mindful,” she says.

Starting today though, she’s free to shop new again. What does she plan on buying?
“I don’t really need anything,” says McMahon, 41. “Maybe a haircut.”

  The Challenge: Join the Compact for a week.
Motivation: Watch The Story of Stuff. It's a free 20-minute online video that will open your eyes to the damage of our disposable consumer culture.
Process: Don’t buy anything new – other than food, medical supplies or safety essentials. You can shop all you want at Value Village or the Goodwill, though.
Cost: Perfectly nothing.
Savings: It depends on how much of a shopaholic you are. Over the year she spent abstaining from shopping for her book Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, New York journalist Judith Levine paid down her $8,000 credit card debt.

If you think this is hard-core, check out No Impact Man. He spent a year not only not shopping, but not driving, not using electricity, not even taking the subway.

-- Catherine Porter

On Patricia's sage advice, here is the webiste for Freecycle in Toronto -- it's a kind of free Craig's List.

Mr. Bug has no problem with coal

I spent a few days down in West Virginia looking into where we in Ontario get much of our coal. It was eye-opening. If you haven't had time to read the article, then check out the slide-show (same page). It's a Cole's Notes version.

One of the most damaging thing about mountaintop removal coal mining is the valley fills it creates. Basically, they lop the top third of a mountain off and then pitch it all into the valley below.

Some people who live in those valleys are understandably upset about it. And they've started to take the companies, and the government to court -- first for doing it, and then for allowing them to do it.

This has inspired a Pro-Coal group in the area called "Friends of Coal." It's funded by Walker Machinery, a company that's in the business of providing mining equipment -- and fixing it --  for these very mines. The owner of the company, Steve Walker, says the locals opposing the mines "range from uninformed citizens to eco-terrorists." The water coming off these mine sites are "almost completely cleaner than the water that's already there," he says.
And then the biggest threat -- without mining, the state will have to turn to gambling to make money.

His company has funded this ad. It's an enlightening picture of American politics around global warming.

-- Catherine Porter

Challenge 6 -- We just want to say one word...

This week we just want to say one word to you — just one word — “Plastics.”

But while the businessman who spoke (something like) this immortal line in the 1967 film The Graduate viewed plastics as the key to the future, and fortune, our aim this week is to put them in their proper place.

Plastics are not Satan in shiny disguise. They have many important functions. They’re not so benign, though, when produced at great environmental expense, used briefly, then, tossed away to pile up in landfills or go through an energy-intensive collection, sorting and recycling process.

The Challenge: Eschew all major plastic items this week. in particular — no plastic bags, disposable plastic cups and bottles (that includes styrofoam), and plastic wrapping.

Motivation: Every year, Canadians use about 10 billion plastic shopping bags and 8 billion disposable cups. Each requires just a tiny amount of resources and energy to produce, but the total is huge. This is not only a waste. Production of plastics — mostly from petroleum — emits greenhouse gases. Recycling, when it happens, consumes ever more. It's also sporadic and difficult. Plastics last virtually forever in landfills, and emit toxic fumes if not burned hot enough. Bags create a mess in the environment. Birds and animals can get entangled in, or choke on, carelessly discarded plastic bags. Huge rafts of plastic float in the Pacific Ocean: After the sun breaks them down into their molecular bits, they’re swallowed by jellyfish and other creatures and begin a poisonous trek up the food chain.

Process: The challenge involves five simple steps: Use cloth or other reusable bags for groceries and most other shopping. Keep produce loose instead of bagging it. Get a permanent coffee cup for work. Use a refillable, preferably metal, water bottle. Don’t buy anything in a blister pack or one of those plastic shells that require a chainsaw to open.

The key to this – since reusables require more resources and energy to make — is to keep using them over and over. There is plenty of controversy over whether styrofoam cups are better than ceramic or metal on this score. A 1994 study from the University of Victoria concluded that when you take manufacture and washing into account, you’d need to use a cup 1,006 times until it’s energy consumption got down to that of foam cups. But that analysis is criticized for its assumptions about water use and the fact it ignored the impacts of disposing of all those cups. A more recent study concludes that a ceramic cup beats styrofoam after 46 uses. Unless you’re prone to toss cups at your boss, that’s an easy figure to hit. I’ve used the same favourite coffee cup almost every morning for 10 years.

Of course, since you likely already have an extra cup or mug at home, simply use it and you'll use zero resources and produce zero emissions.

Since we don’t like to make the challenges overwhelming, we’ve proposed just a few steps. But there are many more ways to cut your consumption of plastic. For a start try Living Plastic Free. If you'd like to go further, try Life Without Plastic.

Cost: Not a big deal. A few dollars, perhaps, for reusable grocery carriers and a couple more for a cup — or just bring one from home. A good water bottle might set you back $10. If you’re worried about bpa, then, fork out around $25 for a metal water bottle.

Savings: Again, it’s a minor factor. Some stores charge a few cents for each bag; others take a penny or two off your bill if you bring your own. Starbucks and some other coffee outlets reduce the cost by 10 cents if you use your own mug.

--- Peter Gorrie