OK, I’ll say it. “I hate drive through’s!”

These inventions of our hurried lifestyle are a completely unnecessary. Sure, they allow coffee and fast food consumers the illusion of getting their product quicker (an illusion because it’s sometimes, but not always true), and the luxury of sitting in their idling vehicles listening to the radio, or perhaps not getting as wet if it’s raining.

The downside of extra emissions are often discussed, but don’t let being sick of hearing about it take away from the value of the argument. Idling is a complete waste of energy and an unnecessary and controllable source of greenhouse gases. We can, and should, take advantage of this small but easily achievable GHG reduction.

Doing so requires more than just non-enforced anti idling bylaws, even if you’ve actually managed to get your community to pass anti idling bylaws. It requires saying no to applications for drive throughs at the planning stage, and finding ways to encourage companies to stop using them. Push comes to shove, it may require that we regulate them out of existence. And yes, I admit, it may even require compensating companies who have already made capital investments around the old rules when they have to spend money modifying their parking lots.

Mostly it requires an attitude shift, and for idling to become as socially unacceptable as drinking and driving.  This, along with other necessary attitude shifts like getting away from gas guzzlers, is vital to our future and this time we don’t have a generation to make it happen.

Someone tried to justify the drive through to me the other day on the basis of mum’s with babies who would otherwise A) leave their child in the car while they went in for coffee, or B) go through all the hassle of unloading their child from the car.

Please.

What kind of irresponsible parent leaves their child in the car while they go in for a coffee? Yes, you hear stories, and they’re all despicable, but that’s no justification of why our society needs drive throughs.

And you’d have to unload your child from the car?  I’m sorry.  Let’s let Bangledesh drown so you don’t have to suffer that inconvenience.

Whatever did our parents do before the age of the drivethrough? Perhaps they actually made their coffee at home, at work, just went without, or maybe they got out of the bloody car. I’ll have to ask my mum.

Let’s be clear. Incineration is NOT waste diversion.

This June 27 Editorial on www.yorkregion.com berates York Region and Local politicians from backing off on a plan, along with Durham Region, to incinerate trash as a waste diversion strategy to meet provincial goals. The goals are necessary because Michigan has objected to taking Ontario’s trash, as well they should.

The Editorial closes, “Residents need to remember who produces the trash and take ownership for its waste.”

Actually, I think that many of the opponents of incineration, including yours truly, know exactly who produces the trash, and who should take ownership. That would be the wholesalers, retailers, packagers, and manufacturers of products sold in the region.

We need laws enforcing Extended Producer Responsibility. ie: if you build it you are responsible for it’s lifecycle.

Until we have politicians at the provincial and federal level who enact such laws, these (ir)responsible parties will continue to get away with dumping their products and packaging into the market, forcing citizens and municipal governments to struggle for a solution for too much waste and no where to put it.

If incineration is to be considered as a “waste diversion” strategy, then we need to call it what it is.

In the same way that a “landfill” is more properly called a “dump”, a place where we can dump the unwanted product of our society under the illusion that it’s gone, “waste diversion” is more properly called “waste conversion.”

In some cases, like green bins and composing, the bio matter is “converted” to soil. This is good.

In the case of incineration of solid waste, the waste is “converted” to carbon dioxide and “dumped” into the atmosphere. Not so good.

Remember carbon dioxide, that invisible climate changing gas that Al Gore and David Suzuki tell us so much about? The one which even our Conservative government concedes must be reduced?

Are we to consider the atmosphere our next free dumping ground?

Incineration is waste conversion, pure and simple.

There is only one viable waste diversion strategy. Stop making waste.

This has been a not-so-brief interruption in my blogging as Mollie and I took a long anticipated vacation to the Netherlands. We saw many wonderful sights, experienced the local culture, and visited with family that we see far too infrequently. Fortunately, with the age of instant global communication, maintaining contact makes the world a smaller place.

There were a bunch of highlights from the trip that are appropriate to mention here. I plan specific posts about several of them, but here’s a brief list:

Transportation:

• Bicycles. There are more bicycles in Holland than citizens. Many families own one car, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who does not own a bike and many people own more than one.
• Bike lanes everywhere! With alternate coloured pavement and traffic signals for bikes.
• Bike racks everywhere! The bicycle parking at the train stations is larger than the car parking!
• Street designs and traffic rules that favour walking and cycling above driving.
• Very little free parking, and more expensive (if available at all) as you near the city core.
• Trains, trains and more trains. The Dutch have a network crisscrossing the country with “Intercity” trains going between major centres and Light Rail “Stop Trains” which run to the small towns in between. For each point A and point B you choose, there’s at least 3 ways to get there. And the trains run frequently, on time, all night long.
• For the few destinations with no train service, there are buses.
• The trains and buses run on the same fare system, with zones and strip tickets that you can use across the country.
• A Stoptrain goes directly to the Amsterdam airport in a tunnel. Not just to and from the City Centre, but as just one more stop in the network. Go up the escalator and you are in the terminal building! During the day it runs every 15 minutes and even in the middle of the night it runs every hour. Coming home, we had a 8 minute walk from our downtown hotel to the train, a 15 minute train to the airport, and then of course the lengthy flight.
• In Brugge, Belgium (a sight-seeing side trip) we parked at the train station outside the city and our parking stub allowed us to ride the bus to the city centre and back free of additional charge.
• In 17 days, I saw one stop sign. All the rest of the intersections were traffic lights, roundabouts and yield signs.
• There is no turning right on a red light.
• There is no turning left on a green light and having to wait for oncoming traffic to clear. If you have a left turn signal, you go. Otherwise you stop behind the line. There are no cars cluttering the intersection.
• I saw very little of people running caution lights or driving over the line to be in the way of bicycles and pedestrians.
• Bicycles are given preference at the lighted interesections, with cars stopping behind them.
• Photo radar in all speed zones.  Some are fixed and some are mobile.  Generally, I just drove the speed limit.

Power:

• From what I can gather, the Netherlands does not have any nuclear power. The only power generation I saw was coal and wind, but I understand that they also burn waste at the power plant. I did not specifically see examples of district energy, but I know it’s there and I think it’s more common in the larger city cores.

Waste:

• Since we were staying with my family, I got to see how they lived on a daily basis. The city collects trash bins and green bins. Beer, Liquor and Wine bottles work on a deposit-return system, and other glass and metal waste must be brought to a central depot.
• One aspect I did not approve of was that plastics were not separated for recycling, but instead are sent to trash which is sent for incineration in energy-from-waste plants.
• All in all, it’s far better than our system. There’s very little true waste since they have no room for landfill.  I’m not sure what they do with this.

Heating/Cooling:

• This is my second trip to the Netherlands, the first being 5 years ago. In all the homes I visited, I never once saw a hot water tank. The Dutch use, almost exclusively, tankless / instantaneous hot water heaters which do not waste energy keeping water hot all day when it’s not being used. I first heard about this from my mother when she went there in 1978. These are available in Canada now, but at a significantly higher cost than the tank version ($900 vs $200), and they are not available for rent anywhere that I have seen. I even complained to Direct Energy about this. Hmmm. Seems like a good business opportunity for someone.

The Netherlands. It’s a great country to visit. And you can see 90% of it without renting a car.

My advice? Rent bicycles and get a rail pass. And only rent a car for a day the odd time you need it.

If you do rent a car, WATCH FOR CYCLISTS!!! They’re everywhere, and they often have the right-of-way.

The media is reporting this week that the Government of Ontario will ban the sale of incandescent light bulbs by 2012. Strictly speaking, this is not true.

What they actually will do is to raise the standard for efficiency for light bulbs such that the existing incandescent bulbs on the market don’t make the grade. This leaves the door open to light bulb manufacturers who want to bring higher efficiency incancescent bulbs to market, which they undoubtedly will.

You can read the governments press release here.

There are many people up in arms about the less than pleasing light from CFL’s, CFL’s are not dimmable, CFL spirals don’t fit in standard lampshades, CFL’s contain mercury, etc.

So let’s take these one at a time, shall we?

Myth 1: The light from CFL’s sucks!

First, the light from CFL’s is different depending on which you purchase. They come in all sorts of different colour temperatures. But you would not know that if you don’t go shopping for them and read the packaging and do a little research. I read by the light of the CFL’s in my night side table every day, with no problems. And my eyesight is far less than perfect.

Myth 2: CFL’s are not dimmable!

There are dimmable CFL’s, they are just hard to find and a bit more expensive. I don’t own any, and I am told by some that they make noise, but I can’t say first hand. You can find some here, for example. With that said, I am fairly confident that the light bulb manufacturers are working overtime to work out any bugs with dimmable CFL’s, as jurisdictions all over the world are demanding these products, so by 2012 we should have plenty on the market.

Myth 3: CFL spirals don’t fit in lampshades!

Of course they don’t! So buy a CFL with a different shape! They are available as you can see with the link above, or in any of our stores selling CFL’s if you look. They come in the same size and shape as regular bulbs with the spiral on the inside. Don’t believe me? They are holding up my lampshades just fine.

Myth 4: CFL’s contain mercury that will end up in our dumps!

Well, maybe this is not a myth, but that depends on you. Yes, they contain mercury. I have previous blogged about the mercury issue here. But they need not end up in the dump with that mercury leeching into the environment.

• The right way to do this is to have a deposit-return system and keep the bulbs out of the trash.
• The wrong way to do it is to depend on municipal recycling, another burden on our taxes.
• And the REALLY wrong way to do it is to do nothing, and let the bulbs go to the curb.

Do you think our provincial government will get it right? I guess we’ll see, but I’m not holding my breath. (Perhaps we’ll be returning light bults to the beer store next!)

Here’s a bright idea! In the next election, vote Green!

There has been much discussion in the news lately about light bulbs, since Australia became the first country to take the step of banning the old, familiar incandescant light bulb. Other jurisdictions, including Ontario and some other provinces, are now talking about following suit. Tyler Hamilton had an excellent summary of the issue in his Toronto Star article just this past Monday, and there are many more.

There is, of course, something to the mercury argument. Critics of the proposed ban correctly point out that compact flourescent light bulbs (CFL’s) contain mercury which, if they end up in a landfill, break and release this mercury into the environment where it eventually gets into groundwater and, well, you can imagine. Proponents correctly point out that the total mercury released to the environment by powering the light from a coal fired power plant plus disposal of the bulbs is still less than that same coal plant powering an incandescent bulb for the same length of time. Take a look at this graph.

These arguments then degenerate into discussions about the promise of “clean coal” and the effectiveness of our municipal recycling programs. So in the end, doing the math to determine which light bulbs are least environmentally damaging is beyond the capability or desire of most of us.

It’s enough to give you a headache, when all you want to do is flip on the light and read your book.

As usual, I have a different solution in mind. It seems to me that this problem is a perfect example of the need for “Extended Producer Responsibility” (EPR) that the Green Party has promoted for a very long time. The idea is simply, if you manufacture and sell it, then you are responsible for it. No sending the product to dumps. No sending the product to municipal recycling systems, which are not set up for them. In other words, no economic externalities.

I envision a deposit-return system for light bulbs. For arguments sake, let’s say $0.50 per bulb. When the bulb dies, the consumer returns it to the manufacturer via the point of purchase and gets back $0.50 per bulb. Since this product contains toxic mercury, then you only get $0.25 back if it is broken and the mercury has escaped and the company pays $0.35 to the government. This $0.10 penalty would actually cost the company money and motivate them to provide the means for returned light bulbs to be intact.

With people and manufacturers motivated to keep the bulbs intact, we would quickly see the adoption of packaging that would be reused and returned. An added bonus that keeps packaging out of the dump as well.

In Ontario, of course, our provincial government will likely prefer to spend money on recycling programs, let the manufacturers off the hook, again, and we’ll be told to return our light bulbs to the beer store. – LOL

At the risk of being labelled the Grinch, I have to say that I hate these inflatable Christmas decorations that are popping up on people’s lawns all over the place.

Hate is a strong word. One that I don’t used lightly or often. But in this case, it’s the appropriate word to express my feelings. [Please note that I don't hate the people buying these things, just the things themselves. For those people I feel disappointment, that they care so little about the environment they are leaving for their children, or sadness that they do not yet see the connection.]

Now, why do I hate these things?

Is it because I think they are a bit on the tacky side? I do, but that’s not the reason. No, it’s that I think that they boldly typify the wastefulness of our society, especially during the holiday season.

To illustrate my point, I decided to be a bit of an engineering geek and do the math on how wasteful these things really are. [For those not interested in just how much of a geek I can be, skip past the point form to the bottom of the post.]

• I first went to the depository of all knowledge [the web] and found that these things range from 51.6 Watts for the 4 foot model to 78 Watts for the 12 foot model. As advertised on Gemmy’s [the manufacturer] website, this is about the equivalent of a string of bulbs, so it doesn’t seem like much.
• I then went to web sites for Canadian Tire and other retailers and found pricing for these ranging from $75 for the small model to $250 for the big ones.
• On Gemmy’s web site, and from some newspaper articles, I found that the market for these things [in 2006 alone] is about US$500 million [or CAN$579 million] for the North American market.
• Assuming about 50% of sales for the smallest models and only 5% of sales for the largest, I then calculated the number of units of each size to make up this much in sales. [Excel is a wonderful tool!]
• I know that some people don’t run them 24/7 but everyone in my neighbourhood seems to, so I just used that assumption.
• Multiplying all of this together, I calculated the power demand and kWh per day that we need to produce just to light up and blow up all of those Santa’s, Rudolf’s, Frosty’s, Christmas carousels, frolicking penguins, and on and on.

The answer? 330 Megawatts.

Just for the number of these stupid things sold this year, never mind the last 4 years of sales!

To put this in perspective, this is slightly larger than the natural gas fired power plant that was proposed for Newmarket last year that neighbours objected to because of emissions. NIMBY indeed!

A plant that size would cost the taxpayer in the neighborhood of $400 million dollars.

And what of the emissions? If the power is generated by coal, we would spew out 7.5 metric tonnes of CO2 per day. For natural gas, 4.7 metric tonnes per day.

And yet we are told we can’t meet our Kyoto objectives, we can’t close down coal fired generating plants in Ontario, we can’t avoid spending $40 billion on nuclear plants “because we must keep the light’s on…”

If there’s one thing I hate more than inflatable Christmas decorations, it’s these lame excuses for killing the earth and our children’s future.

As I was putting out the garbage and recycle bins this morning, I stood at the end of my driveway, looked around and was struck by the old debate, “It’s easy being Green” vs “It’s not easy being Green.”

It leads me to reflect on what being Green means. I’m sure it means different things to different people, but I think it deserves a few words here to explain what it means to me.

In my mind, being Green is not a list of actions, but more a state of mind. Once one becomes aware of Green thinking, and I mean really aware, then everything you do, everything you read, see on TV, every conversation, and every purchasing decision is viewed through that filter.

Not everything you do needs to be excessively Green, but you are aware of the effects of your actions.

These two pictures illustrate my point…

In the left hand picture, the homeowners were thinking green as they put their garbage out. In the right hand picture they were not.

Can you spot the difference?

It’s all in the placement of your garbage bags/container in relation to the neighbors.  In the left hand picture the garbage truck stops once for two homes, but in the right hand picture, the truck stops twice.

Not to be too geeky about this, but statistically speaking there are four possibilities for this, even if the placement of garbage bags is random rather than actually thought out (which at 7:00 am is a possibility, I admit!).  If it’s entirely random, only 25 percent of adjacent homes would put their garbage together.  So that means 75% of the garbage placement could be more green.

Can you imagine the fuel used, the tax money wasted, and the extra carbon emissions from the truck starting and stopping twice instead of once in 75% of the cases?

For every 100,000 homes

= 50,000 pairs of homes

= 37,500 stops that the garbage truck does not have to make.

This is just one small example of something that costs absolutely nothing and saves so much, if only people saw the world through a Green filter.

Mollie and I were up to cottage country this past long weekend and experienced the results of the power outage, which was not restored till Monday afternoon.

The biggest challenge was keeping things cold. Fortunately for us the local town had power so it was not much effort to buy ice and keep things cool. We were better off than many others. We had oil lanterns for light, a propane BBQ and a fire pit for cooking, and used buckets of lake water to flush. We did not want for much.

Our other challenge was making coffee in the morning and this, of course, was a major issue. Neither the BBQ nor the fire was appropriate for the perculator.

I know, I know, get to the point.

Before we went to the cottage I was rummaging through my old camping gear to see if I had anything useful to bring. There wre some items from my past when I used to motorcycle and wanted to keep the gear extremely small and light.

One of the items that I found was a single burner propane element that I picked up in a yard sale for $1.00 and have never used. The model pictured here is from Coleman, whereas the one I have is in a box from Sears, but it is basically the same thing. This seemed good for coffee so off I went to Canadian Tire to find out how to attach this to the propane tank.

Little did I know that this particular unit, and many other items on sale from Coleman and its competitors, require the use of disposable propane canisters. I had the canister in my hand and it seemed to be the right thing for my burner, but it said non-refillable. So I asked a Canadian Tire employee, “What do I do with this when it’s empty?” To which he replied, “Throw it away.”

Without stopping to think that this was not the fault of this poor fellow, I said, “Seriously ? I’m not buying that! And you shouldn’t be allowed to sell it!” I have to wonder what kind of crackpot he thought I was or if he even got my point, but it is an issue well beyond his control in any case. Sorry about that, bud.

The point is that this disposable item, sold by Coleman, a company making camping equipment so that you can “commune with nature” is the epitome of irony.

I haven’t written my complaint letter to Coleman and Canadian Tire yet. But I will.