Crap for clunkers?

It is extremely tempting to want to replace your old clunking (Insert old technology here) with the new top of the line energy efficient model. However, if you look at energy consumption and sleek new features alone it may seem merited. However, a superficial analysis will omit key factors that you should be considering. For instance, how much energy is going into manufacturing your brand new whatever? Also what happens to the old clunker as it goes out the door? If it leeches heavy metals into a landfill, maybe it is best that you keep it in use.

If your car is the source of smog in Toronto like this one, maybe it is time to send it to car heaven - Photo courtesy of failblog.org, my source for lols -

There is no catch-all answer to this dilemma as it depends entirely on the situation. Replacing your old iPod nano for the new iPod touch might not make sense from an environmental standpoint. Comparatively, replacing your dad's ancient hummer with a smart car as an urban zip-around car makes infinite sense, especially if the hummer remains permanently parked in a museum. The greenest purchase (as boring as this is going to sound) is to use what you have or buy something used as it avoids manufacturing. However, in some cases the purchase of a new item is certainly merited, especially if the item will last you a long time (please skip on the used undergarments).

Oilsands are not the problem

No pun intended but the Canadian Tarsands have certainly become a hot topic as of late, my view on them as such:

I think the oilsands are a consequence of our dependence on fossil fuels, if it wasn't the oil sands we were mining, it would be the arctic wildlife reserve or the vast oil stores in Columbia which would also have terrible environmental consequences.

With the vast investment that has already been sunk into the tarsands and considering the boost it has given to the Canadian economy, I think it is highly unlikely that shutting down the tarsands is feasable. Thus, if we truly wish to see the end of such projects, we should be looking to alternative fuels and transportation methods that are equally effective, convenient and as cheap as oil. After all, if we didn't need oil, would we mine for it? The stone age did not end due to a shortage of stones, similarly, to get beyond our petroleum days, an effective and cheap alternative for oil or the transportation that depends on it must be used.

A single tire for a tarsand dump truck costs roughtly $30 000 CAD, that could buy two smart cars!

Re-using Wrapping Paper

Christmas is over and I hope that you saved some of that wrapping paper! As long as it isn't torn apart by an over-excited child receiving a Wii, it is often in good enough condition to be re-used on a gift. This can save you on more wrapping paper purchases next year.


Another idea is forgoing the store-bought wrapping paper and using recycled materials. I use newspaper, but for those who find this a bit tacky, old maps suit the purpose quite handsomely and give gifts a bit of a designer feel. At Queen's you can pick up maps in the basement of Stauffer near the map library as a stream of maps are always taken out of circulation. Not only do these make excellent wrapping paper, but can be used to decorate student housing. Some are even well-suited to framing as the framed heraldric crests of England map in my brother's room attests.

The Best Green Websites I know

Here are the websites I check almost daily. Count on them to provide news on the hottest environmental innovation, policy or happenings:

TreeHugger.com - THE source for all of my enviro technology, political and events news. Despite its name, it is realistic in nature and resourceful in its data sources - I'm just reading an article now on bacteria that detect landmines

Inhabitat.com - How design will save the world

Appropedia - The Wikipedia of appropriate (many of them green!) Technologies

Would highly recommend that you check out all of the above and check back often, or subscribe to them

Use Precaution for the Precautionary Principle

Today I had a great meeting with Dr. Philip Jessop, a green chemistry professor at Queen's University whose research is playing a major role in the greening of the chemical industry.

During the discussion, a real gem of a though emerged; how the precautionary principle (PP for short), though well intended, does not make sense in many circumstances. The PP is defined as (borrowed from wikipedia):

A moral and political principle which states that if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action.

To roughly translate: if there is a risk of something bad happening as the result of an action, don't do it.

When I was first introduced to this in the context of environmental science class, it made perfect sense. For instance, if we had played it safe with DDT and not used it, a lot more birds would be spared dead due to ultra-thin eggshells and reproductive failures. If the Ukraine had never built a nuclear reactor, they never would have had the Chernobyl disaster. These are two well-known cases in reference to which the PP has merit.

However, what about a caesarean section? As my mother can attest, getting one of these entails a HUGE risk with guaranteed harm. I was an oversized baby and if my mother followed the precautionary principle, it is a likely possibility that only one of us would be around today. However, as a result of taking the risk, we are alive and well. The absurdity of the precautionary principle in certain situations can be applied to countless daily experiences; if I walk outside, I might get hit by a bus and therefore I should stay inside; if I use a sharp knife to cook dinner, I might lose a finger and therefore should cut my carrots with karate chops only.

Applied this to business scenario and we soon see real economic costs of blind adherence to this principle. If a product is almost guaranteed to make a profit, is it wise financial sense that it be withheld if there is uncertainty on its environmental effects? Well, I would venture a guess that it would depend on the product; releasing a new toothbrush design on the market is far less dangerous than releasing a new nuclear reactor.

In short, don't fall onto the precautionary principle as a panacea, it should be used judiciously and after a cost-benefit analysis.

Recycling? Reduce and Reusing are still better

Photo: A landfill I visited, note the perfectly useful children's bench, and deck chairs. If we tried hard enough, I'm sure that we would find that most of the items we discard would be useful to somebody else. One person's trash is another person's treasure, isn't that right?


In my highschool days, I would focus myself obsessively on nudging people to recycle as much as possible. From boisterous skits in front of the school to public dives into garbage cans in front of my much amused classmates, I was obsessed with getting each and every discarded can, bottle and plastic wrapper into the recycle bin.

What I overlooked though was the two preceeding R's, reduce and reuse. Recycling is of great importance, but reducing and reusing should come first. Why? Because prevention is better than cure. Its better of us to stop consuming the things that need recycling in the first place. Recycling uses a great deal of energy to transform those discarded plastics into useful items that we can use like fleece-based clothing and recycled plastic benches. But, remember that not all of what we throw into the bin can get recycled due to a variety of factors. Consider cross-contamination, in public buildings, if a recycling bin is "contaminated" with carelessly tossed garbage, it becomes innefficient for maintenance staff to sort through and remove the garbage, resulting in perfectly good reycleables being tossed. Also, recycling takes a lot of transferring, from the bins to the trucks, to the recycling plants and sorting bins within these plants. Its inevitable that some recycleables get lost along the way, be they dropped from forklifts or blown from that blue bin on the end of the curb.

If we are to focus our efforts, it has far more positive impact to put them towards first reducing and reusing. This should be intuitive, when we reduce consumption, we reduce the resources being taken from the earth. Hopefully, this can also translates into financial savings. As a student, take the coffee a day as an example. An average cup costs about $2 (although there are far fancier and more expensive caffeine fixes on the market) if consumed daily before classes, that amounts to $10 a week, and roughly $30 a month. These little things add up on the wallet, not to mention all of those disposeable cups along the way.

Reusing is also a much-overlooked yet highly enjoyable R. When you reuse something, be it clothing, pop bottles or the desk your neighbor put out on the curb, you are not only reducing your need to consume, but you are repurposing that item in a way that is far less energy-intensive than recycling. My company prides itself on re-using. Two of our products feature reused items. Our bicycle trailers use wood from discarded pallets while our small and mini vermicomposters use plastic buckets which are non-recycleable in Kingston (Apparently, #2 grade plastic is not recycled). To find new and useful ways to reuse items that may be discarded around the house, I would highly recommend instructables a great website for all kinds of Do-it-yourself projects. A company now famous for reusing is TerraCycle Inc, which uses pop bottles to package its fertilizer products, cookie wrappers to make backpacks and single-use grocery bags to make stronger reusable bags. With a little ingenuity, a lot of what we would throw out into the garbage or blue bin can be repurposed for re-use.

Now, although I emphasize the first two R's I still firmly believe that recycling is of great importance. Energy intensive as it is, it enables us to reuse discarded and otherwise "worthless" materials (like last week's newspaper) for more useful products (like today's newspaper). It helps companies looking for raw resources find materials that are not extracted new from the environment. It is of utmost importance that we recycle as much as possible as there is simply no excuse for recycleable water bottles and aluminum cans going to the landfill instead of a recycling plant. However, just remember if you (like me) decide to run a recyclying blitz and to dive into dumpsters in order to save a can or two, that you do not forget yourself the importance of those first two R's, they're ahead of recycling for a reason after all!

Sustainable Start

Sustainable - what has to be one of the most over-used, misunderstood and misguided concepts of our century.

If you're here, you probably know all the reasons why we should care about it. You must be well-aware of how the media bombards us with an endless slew of misgivings, rapid rises in sea levels, imperiled polar bears, razed rainforest and the list continues. All of this is overwhelming at times, and it is becoming increasingly easy to descend into apathy - after all, there's just too much to worry about.

Rightly so, there is a lot to worry about, but at least there are a lot of us doing the worrying now instead of an isolated few. Remember, it is a sign of change that the media focuses on these news itmes, however bad they may be. Its a sign that these issues matter to people, otherwise, they would not be written about. Apathetic as people may be, at least they are aware of the most pressing environmental concerns; a situation far better than total and utter ignorance. There is hope, buried in this growing landfill of confusion.

I started this blog because I was confused, what is the right thing to do in times like these? There is no shortage of options out there: local, organic, vegetarian, soy-based, zero-emissions and etc. This blog is an assimilation of all of the random readings and ideas that I come across in my daily life, from environmental websites to class readings, I hope to put my education to good use, looking into some hard facts, sort fact from fiction and provide you the reader with advice on how to make the right decision in these difficult times. By no means do I claim to be an expert an all things sustainable, but I don't think these issues should take a PhD to understand as then we will be in great trouble (Just how many of us on this planet have PhD's?). Sustainabiliy should be simple, accessible and straightforward, something that anybody can relate to. Hopefully this blog will be a step in this direction.


Photo: On the Wolfe Island Ferry - with bicycle trailers and luggage in tow
credit: Nathan