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

Big Foot revisited

Just when you thought going green couldn't get any more complicated along comes the New Yorker magazine with "Big Foot," an article by Michael Spector that raises questions about the assumption that eating locally produced food is always better, in climate change terms, than stuff that's imported from a long distance away, even if it's shipped by air. It's generally assumed that greater distance means more greenhouse gas emissions. Spector argues that's not invariably the case. It's worth a read, although it doesn't deal with the issues raised in our Challenge 3, about the heavy impact of consuming animal products. Here's one example:

"Researchers at Lincoln University, in Christchurch, found that lamb raised in New Zealand and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to England produced 688 kilograms of carbon-dioxide emissions perton, about a fourth the amount produced by British lamb. In part, that is because pastures in New Zealand need far less fertilizer than most grazing land in Britain (or in many parts of the United States.)"

Nevertheless, that still leaves the choice of lamb or not lamb. 686 kilograms is a lot of CO2.

--Peter Gorrie

Challenge 5: Throwing down the gauntlet -- and the keys

Not more joking around.

You’ve switched your light bulbs, screwed in your water-saving nozzles, even given up one of those T-bone dinners you love so much every week. But, if we are really going to rope in climate change before it’s too late, we need to address one inescapable habit: driving.

No matter how many pet names you have for your car, it’s still chief among evils when it comes to greenhouse gases – not to mention smog, acid rain and sprawl.

So, this week, it’s time to cut back on the gas.

For some of you, whose Hondas resemble igloos right now, it might hardly seem a stretch. But if you count yourself among that special Greater-Toronto breed of commuters, spending up to an hour and twenty minutes behind the wheel every day just to get to work and back, it will seem a serious sacrifice.

The Challenge: Spend one less day in the car this week than is your norm. Period. Taking a cab instead of driving doesn’t count.

If you are a road-warrior who all but lives in your car, that means one day on transit, carpooling or walking.

If you are like me, and only really drive on weekends, it means schlepping your groceries the old-fashioned way – on your shoulders.

Motivation: Transportation makes up more than quarter of our green house gases in the country.

Specifically, for every kilometre you drive in average-sized car, you spew out 316 grams of green house gases. Your SUV discharges an extra 145.

The average Canadian round-trip commute is 16 kilometres. But in the GTA, where people are known to leave their homes before dawn to avoid parking on Highway 401, it’s much, much more. One commuter profiled in The Star last December, Michael Barrett, drives 150 kilometres a day to get from his Oshawa home to his office in Mississauga and back.

So, let’s take a happy median. If you chuck your keys and cut out 32 kilometres of driving over one day, you’ll cut out more than 10 kilograms of carbon dioxide. Do that every week for a year, and you’ll cut out as much carbon as if you’d unplugged your home for two whole months. Astounded? It's true -- if you factor in the fact that in Ontario, about about 80 per cent of our electricity comes from green sources. (I know that building nuclear plants requires a lot of greenhouse gases, but so does building solar panels.... I'm talking output here.) To do the math on that, the World Wildlife Fund Canada's Keith Stewart pointed me to Environment Canada's inventory on greenhouse gases, which shows that in Ontario every kilowatt-hour of electricity translates to 220 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Process: Remove car keys from pocket, put them in a distant drawer for the day. Locate the nearest public transit stop.

Cost: Time spent planning. If you live in the suburbs and need to cross town for work, you’ll have to get familiar with a host of Go Transit and TTC maps.

Savings: About $14. Not driving 32 kilometres will mean you’ve just saved about four litres of gas – or about $4. Add to that the ransom you pay daily to park downtown.

-- Catherine Porter

Jail time for climate change deniers?

Politicians who don't address climate change should be thrown in jail.
That's what environmentalist David Suzuki said in a speech at the McGill Business Conference on Sustainability last week.

Their inaction and dismissal of the problem, he said, amounts to a "intergenerational crime."

"What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there's a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they're doing is a criminal act," he told the crowd. 

In his blog, he reiterates his point. Check it out.
-- Catherine Porter 

Challenge 4 -- Slow the flow

After a week up to our knees in the sublimated version of the wet stuff (okay, it was snow), being careful with water might not seem a major issue.
But how we use it has big impacts. So, this week’s challenge is to reduce the amount flowing into, and from, our homes.

The Challenge: Cut your domestic water consumption as much as possible with a few new habits and, perhaps, a couple of purchases.

Motivation: Daily water use in Toronto averages 253 litres per person. The city’s goal is a 15 per cent cut by 2011. Unless your home is one of those in the inner city still paying a flat rate, using less will save you money. It could also cut greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation. It takes one kilowatt-hour of electricity for each cubic metre of water drawn from Lake Ontario, purified, pumped to consumers, removed, run through a sewage treatment plant. That costs only eight cents, but Toronto used 374 million cubic metres last year. Toronto Water's Lou Di Gironimo also points out conservation's biggest benefit is that it lets the city provide water to more people with less infrastructure. what we don't require, we don't need to build.

Process: First, change a few habits: Turn off the faucet while you brush your teeth, shave, or wash vegetables. If you have a dishwasher, don’t pre-wash under the tap. If you hand wash, use the second sink or a bowl, rather than running water, for the rinse. Next, install a low-flow showerhead and faucets: If you’re more ambitious, get a low-flow toilet. Unhandy as I am, I did it recently and, apart from issues related to the fact I live in an old, jury-rigged house, the installation was easy and it does what it’s supposed to.

Beyond these few challenge items, the list of potential water-saving tips goes on and on and on and on. Again, they range from further no-cost changes in habits to the relatively expensive purchase of a water-efficient clothes washer. Mostly, though, it's a matter of viewing water as a precious resource, not just something that's there in an endless supply that we don't have to think about.

Cost: The city sells water efficiency kits for $15. Toilets cost $100 to $400, but you get a $60 rebate from Toronto Water.  There’s also $60 back if you buy an efficient washer. Again, I’ve done both and the cheques do arrive in the mail.

Savings: The city charges about $1.81 for each 1,000 litres of water. Your actual payback depends on how much you reduce. For some changes, the calculation is obvious: Switching from a conventional to low-flow toilet cuts consumption by seven litres per flush. It would take about 150 flushes to save around $2, but they add up fast. Other results aren’t so immediately clear and you’ll likely need to wait for your next water bill to see them.

Let us know how you do.

--Peter Gorrie

Did you try Challenge 3?

By now, some (many?) of you may have tried to go vegan for a day. We'd like to hear how you managed.

What was easy about it? What was hard? What were the worst things to do without, and what new foods did you discover that you really liked?  One of the worst things for me -- and it's tiny -- is finding a substitute for milk, on its own or in the essential cups of coffee. I like soy as a solid, but as a milk replacement -- ugghhh.

Our challenge might have been too simple, since it allows you to just postpone a meaty meal for a day. But this is mainly about awareness and using new knowledge to make choices.

---Peter

Nosing into Nanticoke

So, Tyler Hamilton and I got a rare peak inside of Nanticoke a couple weeks ago.
Tyler cover's clean technology for The Star, which means he's far smarter than me. At least on this topic.
(I'm a better volleyball player, right Tyler? Not that I'm competitive.....)

It was the first trip by journalists into the place in a year. They're rare, for reasons the staff couldn't articulate. At first I thought it might stem from security concerns --  ie. showing too much of the essential nuts and bolts of our energy system to terrorists, or angry hippies, or the folks at Greenpeace, who last year piled into a dinghy and tried to interrupt a shipment of coal enroute to the plant. But then, it could be that Nanticoke has been on the top-three-places-to-despise list of many people for the past couple years, since Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers made the bestseller list. (If you haven't read it, head out to the library right now. Really excellent.) And really, who likes to be unpopular?

The truth is, unless you've signed up for Bullfrog Power and are paying an extra $1 a day for clean electricity to be pumped into South Ontario's grid, Nanticoke is part of your daily life.

If you want to take a peak, check out this little video I shot while there. (Sorry for the odd bumby picture. We were walking too fast at times to set up a tripod.)

-- Catherine Porter

Challenge 3: Moooo-ve away from meat

Mmmmmm.
A thick juicy steak, dripping with barbecue sauce.
Hmmmmm.
A spicy lentil casserole, fragrant baked beans or golden cubes of tufu in a coconut-curry Thai sauce.
The choice is at the heart of this week’s Green Life challenge.
For some of you, it won’t be a big deal. In fact, you might get a free pass this week.
All you dedicated carnivores, though, might think it’s far tougher than the previous challenges — changing light bulbs and making more efficient use of your major appliances.
The Challenge: Eat less meat: To be specific, go vegan for one day a week. That means no animal products. Which means taking meat, poultry, fish and dairy off the menu. And not adding it on any of the other days.

Motivation: There are plenty of alternatives and most of them come with hefty health and environmental benefits. Many also taste just as good; just different.

Meat production consumes a lot of resources and is responsible for substantial pollution, including nearly one-fifth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions — which makes it roughly equal to transportation as a contributor to climate change.

The average Canadian eats about 33 kilograms of beef and nearly 38 kilograms of poulty each year. Per capita consumption has declined a bit here in the past few decades, but globally, meat consumption has soared by 500 per cent since 1950 and is expected to rise 2 per cent annually until 2015.

Some other motivators:

• 70 per cent of Earth’s agriculture land is devoted to pasture or lfeed crops.
  lOne-third ot global cereal crops go to feed livestock.
• Transporting that feed generates 160 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions each year.
• This is no joke. Cattle produce prodigious amounts of methane, which is 23 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. More than 35 litres of methane are generated for each litre of milk.
• Animal agriculture produces 100 million tonnes of methane per year, 85 per cent from digestion and the rest of lagoons where their wastes are stored.

• Vast tracts of forest are cleared for livestock grazing and feed crops.

• A recent Japanese study says the energy consumed to produce a kilogram of beef is enough to drive a reasonably efficient car 100 kilometres or light a 100-watt bulb for 20 daysdays. This and many other tidbits are found in Mark Bittman's New York Times article Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler.

• The average American eats about 100 grams of protein a day. That’s about twice the amount recommended by the U.S. government. Three quarters comes from animal products. So, dietary experts say, we could dramatically cut consumption without any ill effects and, in fact, probably less heart disease and cancer.

Put it all together, says Keith Stewart, of WWF-Canada, and switching from the average Canadian diet to meat-free would cut per capita greenhouse emissions by 1.3 tonnes a year. Since the average total is about 20 tonnes, that’s a substantial gain.

“Simply by going vegetarian (or, strictly speaking, vegan) we can eliminate one of the major sources of emissions of methane, the greenhouse gas responsible for almost half of the global warming impacting the planet today,” says blogger Elizabeth Neve, who proposed this challenge.
PROCESS: Eliminate animal products from your diet one day a week. Don’t increase their consumption the rest of the time.

There are plenty of recipes on the Internet. A good place to start is the Vegan Chef.

If you want to learn what it means to be an all-out Vegan.

And check out the Ethical Man, as he goes vegan.

COSTS AND SAVINGS: Hard to calculate, but plant-based foods are generally cheaper than animal products.

-- Peter Gorrie (Who doesn't eat meat but is big on fish and dairy so will find this a substantial challenge.)

Note from Catherine Porter: For those of you that think one day is extreme, check out this Californian who has pledged to eat only things out of his garden plot for the year, with a few exceptions. He calls it his "100-inch diet."