How To Line Dry Clothing

For a Ethics class project I am working on informing the community just how simple it is to live more sustainably, with a focus on line drying clothing.

Benefits of line drying your clothing:

- Reduces wear and tear on your clothing

- Reduce costs for new clothing because your old clothing doesn’t wear out as fast

- Reduces energy costs.

By line-drying 2 laundry loads per week (many families do more than this), in one month you will reduce your energy cost by $2.80 a month, and that adds up!

- Helps the environment.

By line-drying 2 laundry loads per week for one month, you will reduce your CO2 emissions by 37.6 lbs.

How to do it:

1. Buy a clothesline. You can get these at pretty much any store (try to get the ones specifically labeled clothesline to make sure that it won’t damage or stain your clothing). Dollar Tree is a good place where you can get a 70 ft line for $1 in a bunch of different colors.

2. Buy clothespins. These can also be found at the Dollar Tree, for just a dollar!

3. Buy strong hooks to hang clotheslines up in your house, or just tie the line around a couple of trees in your backyard (make sure the hooks are strong, wet clothing is pretty heavy!)

Two other options:

- If this is still too big of an investment for you try drying your clothes on hangers in a place that is well ventilated.
- If you want to invest more in a smaller device buy a drying rack, these are convenient because they have a lot of space to hang clothes in a little area, and you can move them outside easily on sunny days to dry clothes much faster.

What are you waiting for? Start line-drying your clothing today and help your budget and the environment! Keep an eye out around campus for other ways to live sustainably in the coming weeks.


To learn more about my project go to my project blog at:
http://ra-cep.blogspot.com/

1.2 Gigabytes Saved From Download on Earth Day

On April 22nd, Pacific University recognized Earth Day with a low-energy version of our homepage. In comparison to our typical homepage, yesterday's version took up only 10% of the file size significantly lowering the amount of data that was being transferred when visitors accessed the Pacific website.

Calculating the exact amount of energy we saved is a complex matter; however, we can say that with over 6,000 visitors yesterday, we ended up saving about 1.2 gigabytes (270 KB per visit). Now, your average computer can hold a number of gigabytes, but to put it into perspective this is equivalent to about 2 CD-ROM discs or, in terms of the amount of data that can be held on a printed publication, about one pickup truck bed full of paper. And this is only the amount of data saved on one day by redesigning one web page. Imagine the result if those of us in the Internet industry took sustainability into consideration on a regular basis. The carbon footprint of the web as a whole could be significantly reduced quite easily.

Here at Pacific University, we would like to offer a couple of tips on reducing your own carbon footprint online:

• If you frequently use a particular web page, bookmark it or set it as your browser's homepage. This saves energy by giving you a direct path to the website instead of having to navigate a series of links or search for the information that you need. We recommend that staff and faculty here at Pacific do this instead of using the homepage as a link hub. If you need instructions on how to do so, please contact webmaster@pacificu.edu.

• Think twice about sending an email. If you are in the same building as the person you are communicating with, perhaps your message can be delivered in person. Do you need to hit reply-all when you only need to communicate with one or two people? You can save a lot of energy by cutting back on email, and could possibly increase your personal health by walking to a colleague's office instead of sitting at your desk all day.
  

• Consider whether or not you really need to have data sent from the web to your mobile devices. Doing so not only puts a burden on your phone bill, sending data to your mobile devices is also particularly consuming of energy.
  
  
• When you are able to, choose renewable power. One of the main reasons that the Internet's carbon footprint is so high, is that the electricity that powers it does not come from renewable sources. You can help by choosing renewable energy to power your own computer (if it is available and reasonably priced), and you can choose to do business with companies that use renewable energy. Decreasing the number of data centers and ISPs that get their electricity from coal plants could have a significant, positive impact on our environment.
  

If you have some other ideas related to saving energy online, please leave a comment. We would love to hear from you!

Sustainable Web Design: Celebrating Earth Day With Reduced Energy

Recent studies have found that digital media is not necessarily "green media." You may have heard the news reports that spam is to blame for emitting 17 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere annually or that a Google search, on average, is equivalent to driving 2 miles. As the saying goes, we may not be cutting down trees, but we are certainly inconveniencing a large number of electrons by communicating online. How? Well, the internet runs on electricity, and not always the most renewable energy sources.

Think about it for a second. Your computer and mobile devices consume energy; the server holding any files you are requesting online consumes energy; transferring those files between the server and you consumes energy. What does this mean for web developers? If we want to be environmentally conscious, we need to be concerned about the energy consumption used to view the online content we are creating.

Pacific University's homepage is viewed for approximately one thousand hours each day. During that time, thousands of scripts run on our servers and a significant amount of data is sent out all over the world. Today, we are choosing to publicly acknowledge and compensate for some of the energy that we use regularly in order to deliver that data.

The energy consumption of your website can be limited in a number of ways.
The first is to simply provide smaller, less complex files. In order to view today's version of our homepage, you are only receiving approximately 30 kilobytes of data in comparison to the usual 300 kB. We have done this by decreasing the resolution and size of any images and by eliminating any unnecessary code from our files. Our servers are not having to work as hard to send data to you, and your computer is not having to work as hard to access it.

Another concern for web designers when examining the amount of energy required to make your site available to users is color. Monitors require energy to display a website, CRT monitors in particular. While a good number of web users are now accessing your data through an LCD screen (LCD screens require approximately the same amount of energy to display any color combination), some of Pacific's visitors are still viewing our files on a CRT screen. The US Department of Energy has set ratings for the average amount of energy required for a CRT monitor to display a solid color:

White - 74 Watts	Fuchsia - 69 Watts	Yellow - 69 Watts	Aqua - 68Watts
Silver - 67 Watts	Blue - 65 Watts	Red - 65 Watts	Lime - 63 Watts
Gray - 62 Watts	Olive - 61 Watts	Purple - 61 Watts	Teal - 61 Watts
Green - 60Watts	Maroon - 60 Watts	Navy - 60 Watts	Black - 59 Watts

Therefore, at 1000 hours of viewing per day, the difference that color choice can make in energy output can end up being as drastic, approximately the same difference as switching about 1/4 of your standard light bulbs to compact florescent bulbs. Although we regularly use fairly energy efficient colors on our website, today we have consciously chosen to use colors that are darker in order to ensure that the people viewing our site on CRT monitors are not consuming as much energy in order to do so.

Although internet energy consumption is a topic that is rarely addressed when discussing green living, we at Pacific University believe it is important to realize that providing information online is not necessarily a simple alternative to printing. Just as we need to be careful about what we print and how we print, we also need to be conscious of how we provide our messages online.

Remembering Amy Young

There are many things I have been meaning to write about on this blog - many student initiatives that are transforming our campus and community to make it a more sustainable place - but all those stories are going to have to wait a little longer. Because right now I want to take a moment to remember a Pacific University alumnus whom I never knew very well, but who I know made a very significant impact on this campus and on all those around her. I just recently learned of Amy Young's passing away on December 2nd, and it is her life that I want to commemorate, however inadequately, in this post.

As I said, I did not know Amy very well - other people on this campus could and have described her accomplishments far better than I. But here is what I did know: Amy was compassionate, sincere, creative, and cared deeply about the world. She appreciated the small things in life. She was an activist in a way that I'm afraid I will probably never be; Amy could bring people together to laugh and have a good time while making the world a better place. I know that I am am sometimes a bit of a down-with-the-evildoers type of activist, with a tendency to focus on the negative. Through what I had a chance to see of Amy's work, I glimpsed a different way of changing the world - one that is deeply compassionate, inclusive, and positive. In addition to her Creative Writing major, Amy pursued a minor in Peace and Conflict Studies, and she cared deeply about people and the environment. I know this caring came across in her involvement in many activities on the Pacific campus.

I want to dedicate this post to the memory of Amy and what she did for those around her. I myself am a senior scheduled to graduate from Pacific next month, and I know that as we students prepare to go out into the real world we have a tendency to focus on our own lives, our career goals, our plans for the future. But what if you didn't have much longer to contribute to this world? Would you be able to say that, like Amy, you used your time here to help others in the best possible way? In Amy's memory, I urge anyone who reads this to take some time out of your next afternoon just to smell the grass or enjoy the sunshine; to make someone else smile; to perform some small act of compassion and kindness. This is a blog about sustainability, about world-changing. And in the end, isn't it through small acts like these that we will really change the world?

No life with as much promise and potential as Amy's had should be cut off as soon as her extraordinary life was. But even to those who knew her just slightly, like myself, she has left behind a legacy of kindness. If each of us could make the positive impact on this planet that Amy did, the world would be a much better place. Please remember Amy's struggle.

Remember Amy Young.