Green Manolo

Obligation. It’s a tough word to think about when the subject at hand is keeping the Earth healthy. How much responsibility does each of us have to protect our own environments and, with so much these days being interconnected, the environments of others? For example, a lot of people find it easy to compost their own food waste and use natural fertilizers in their own gardens, but difficult to take the health and welfare of workers and the soil halfway around the globe into consideration when buying something like coffee or bananas. And of course it’s easier – the results of composting are visible right in the trash bin, while the results of choosing responsibly grown and manufactured products isn’t. Not to mention the fact that sussing out the greenest options can be a lot of work!

So the question I want you to ponder today is whether we have a moral obligation to go green.

My view? It would be great if everyone everywhere lived super green lives, but I’m happy just to see people taking baby steps toward a more environmentally conscious existence. I have a difficult time saying outright that it’s our moral duty to save the Earth, if only because my moral code isn’t your moral code isn’t his or her moral code. That said, our world does have a fixed amount of natural resources that we all have to share, and I don’t like the notion of my choices and actions making other people’s lives worse. My guess is that you don’t like it much, either. But does that mean we’re morally obligated to go green? It’s pretty hard to say…

Deepwater Wind, the company behind Rhode Island’s first offshore wind farm, has apparently increased the size of its project and it is now projected that the wind farm will generate 1000 MW of green electrical power. How do you generate that much power? How about 200 wind turbines that will be placed at least 18 miles off the Rhode Island coast, where according to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, things can get pretty windy. Increasing the size of the project means that Deepwater Wind can sell the wind energy produced for somewhere between 15-18 cents/kWh, which is high for the U.S. but fairly close to the New England average. Sounds good to me!

Background: Those in favor of wind farms will tell you that a single utility-scale wind farm (350 mw) can generate enough clean energy to power 125,000 homes every year without users ever seeing a fuel adjustment charge. As for the offshore wind farms that had everyone in such a tizzy around my locale – hello, Cape Wind -they’re apparently set in deep waters, where they are virtually invisible from shore. The anti-wind farm crowd counters that wind power is intermittent and thus cannot generate enough energy to ensure a steady output, which means back-up coal or gas power plants will always be a necessity. I’m not going to bother with the argument that they ruin views of the natural landscape – I personally think big ugly factories and electric wires do the same, but I understand the necessity of both.

What do you think about wind farms and wind power in general? Are they a viable green energy option? Or just a stepping stone on the way to something more reliable?

It’s no secret that every day, entire forests are cut down to make paper. We can choose recycled paper or paper that comes from sustainably harvested forests (as certified by the Forest Stewardship Council). But generally, there’s not much we can do about friends, relatives, and coworkers who insist on printing out every email and doc they receive or even entire web sites.

Until now. The World Wildlife Foundation has created a new, green file format that can’t be printed. The .wwf format is designed to encourage people to think about where their paper is coming from and where it is going – along with saving a few trees here and there. A .wwf file can be opened in most programs used to view .pdf files, but there’s no printing option and and the WWF adds a little note about saving paper to the bottom of every .wwf documents.

“Revenge of the Electric Car” is an upcoming documentary about the EV car revolution created by Chris Paine, director of “Who Killed the Electric Car?”. It will be released in spring of 2001, and let me tell you, I can’t wait!

Who hasn’t popped the cork on one bottle of wine, only to unscrew a second, and wondered what’s the greenest way to seal a wine bottle? There’s nothing quite like the pop of a cork, of course – though nowadays it’s quite likely that the cork that pops out won’t be cork at all, but rather a plastic cork. And even some nicer wines are showing up on the shelves wearing screw tops instead of the more traditional corks. Now I’m not about to get into a debate about which method of sealing works best – cork lovers will mention bottles coming unscrewed and brettanomyces, while cap lovers will bring up the percentage of “corked” wines, ease of use, and it being the least expensive option – but I would like to talk about which method is the most eco-friendly. I thought the best way to do that would be to highlight the green pros and/or cons of corks, plastic corks, and screw tops.

Natural Cork: Cork is a renewable resource – in fact, cork oaks are the backbone (and protector) of unique and bio-diverse Spanish and Portuguese ecosystems. Cork is harvested from cork trees every nine years by hand – part of what makes it the most expensive option – in a process that leaves the tree alive and able to continue absorbing CO2. It also has the smallest carbon footprint. The main con of natural cork is that its failure rate is higher than that of the other options – some say as high as 5% – and that means waste.

Plastic Cork: Plastic corks are made of, well, plastic, and manufacturing that plastic is as environmentally unfriendly as producing any other plastic. Plastic corks are furthermore not recycleable – or at least, many of them aren’t and there are usually no numbers on the bottom or sides to tell the consumer that is can or can’t be tossed in the recycling bin.

Screw Tops: Often cited as the most environmentally friendly wine bottle closure, screw tops have the highest carbon footprint of the three options thanks to how they’re prpduced and are many times non-recyclable because the screw tops contain both plastic and metal. The main pro of screw tops is that, according to some wine bottlers, they have a failure rate of close to 0% which means less wine is poured down the drain.

I think the winner is pretty clear. So why aren’t wine producers everywhere clamoring for natural cork? For one, it’s expensive – or at least more expensive that a plastic cork. Two, demand is starting to outpace supply, which is driving prices up even further. Three, plastic corks and screw tops offer branding opportunities because they come in colors other than cork. And four, the makers of plastic corks and screw tops launched an aggressive marketing campaign a while back that had the effect of decreasing the use of natural cork (90% to 70% of bottles over a shortish period of time).

As for me? I’ll take a nice organic wine with a real cork from a reliable producer that doesn’t let a lot of corked wine make it out into the world. Seems like the greenest way to get a tipple on, no?

How about a ceramic travel mug that doesn’t come with a corporate logo on the side from A Piece By Denise? For your $20, your gift recipient a ceramic travel mug that you can put in the microwave and the dishwasher, and also fits in most car cup holders. Did I mention that every travel mug is hand painted using non-toxic and lead-free food safe glazes? Sweet!

Browsing Eco-Chick recently, I was delighted to stumble onto WASTE since I am a bag fiend. Waste handbags are not only absolutely fantastic, they’re also made exclusively out of discarded materials from the auto industry. I’m talking discarded leather arm rests and head rests, seatbelts, rubber straps, and more. What you end up with is a bag made from high quality materials that are designed to be durable, which is just the thing when you’re looking for an everyday bag.

Every WASTE bag is completely unique because they’re crafted out of what’s available so nothing new is needed to produce them. WASTE’s artisans un-stitch all those discarded parts and then craft something durable and beautiful by hand to achieve a color-coordinated, polished look. Why’s this important? Car upholstery uses a lot of leather (and other stuff), and about 45% of what is used is tossed out. Using the leftovers means less garbage in landfills and less energy spent on making new materials for other industries – in this case, the handbag industry.

As you can probably guess, these green handbags don’t come cheap – my favorite prices in at €193 for the option currently available – but if you have the money and need a bag, why not WASTE?

Okay, I’m sure you’re sick of reading about wall coverings by now – hello, eco-friendly paint, hello, eco-friendly wallpaper – but I have to show you one more cool green thing for your walls. What is it? It’s LIGHT EMITTING WALLPAPER. Light emitting wallpaper was originally developed in 2008 by Jonas Samson, a Dutch designer, as a concept piece, but people went so nuts over it that a lot more money and time has gone into the idea since then.

Some have even theorized that light emitting wallpaper – with its low-energy LEDs or in some cases even OLEDs, wow – could begin to replace standard light bulbs starting as early as 2012. In some cases, light emitting wallpapers have a backing of LEDs in patterns, like in the images here, but in others it’s the entire wall that’s illuminated, creating an even glow that mimics sunlight.

And here’s some technical info about how light emitting wallpaper works when the illumination is coming from OLEDs:

Operating lifetime has traditionally been a problem with OLEDs, but LOMOX has found a way to achieve significantly longer lifetimes than fluorescent lamps with the use of holographically-generated nanostructures to eliminate the 50% loss of light emission, which currently occur with OLEDs. Previous work has shown that reactive mesogen (i.e., polymerisable liquid crystal) OLED emitter materials can be photo-patterned into multicoloured display pixels with no loss in light output due to the photo-patterning process. The technology will also be more efficient (producing 150 lumens/watt) as it only emits light along one axis. OLEDs can produce a more natural looking light than other forms of lighting.

Get all that?

Posting about green painting options on Friday got me to thinking about other eco-friendly wall coverings – in this case, green wallpaper. Over their lifetime, conventional wallpapers can offgas all kinds of unhealthy stuff like dioxins. When it’s time to redecorate, old wallpapers with PVC have to be burned or buried, and both options are less than environmentally conscious. So if you’re planning on papering, choose wallpaper that will be good for you and good for the planet, like these…

Fun Fair Deluxe is hand printed with non-toxic water-based inks on sustainably sourced paper and materials, yet still wipe-able, color fast, and fire retardant. And it’s absolutely vibrant and stunning, too!

This gorgeous wallpaper from Graham & Brown is made from FSC-certified managed timber sources and water-based inks with no VOCs or solvents. Even the packaging is eco-friendly… it’s made of a fully compostable, corn-based material. The pattern, Aspen, is a pretty and fun way to bring the outdoors in.

And then we have this amazing hand-drawn and hand-printed with water-based inks from Madison and Grow. The recyclable, chlorine-free paper is harvested only from sustainable forests. Plus, 100% of the mill’s short paper fiber is reclaimed and used in the agricultural industry for nutrient rich compost or animal bedding. Neat, huh?

Mod Green Pro makes earth-friendly, vinyl- and PVC-free wallpapers that are also beautiful. The company uses water-based inks on Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified paper and finishes the product with a water-based glaze that can tolerate light wiping.

With a baby in the house, we’re pretty careful about what chemicals we use, and paint was high up there on our list of concerns. Made from petrochemical sources and full of stinky volatile organic compounds, regular interior paint can seem pretty shady when you’re thinking of your home improvement from a green point of view. One sniff in a freshly-painted room and you can’t deny that you’re probably breathing in some not-so-great gasses.

That’s why we’re big fans of Green Planet Paints, a line of ecological, clay-based, no-VOC paints developed in southern Arizona. Their non-toxic, plant-based paint formula combines 11 ingredients including water, marble, porcelain clay, mineral pigments, and a soy-based resin. You can breath easy while you’re painting. You can paint with kids present. And unlike the no-VOC paints of the past, which only came in boring pastel colors, Green Planet Paints can color match just about anything in their flat, eggshell, and semi-gloss finishes.

Have you tried the new no-VOC paints? How did you think they compare to standard paint?