How sustainable is sustainability?

For this blog post, I thought I'd pose a question: how sustainable is sustainability? Now at first you may say, "that's a silly question." But let me provide some context...

Everyone seems to be jumping on the "sustainability wagon," but what I wonder is how long it will last. Is it possible that we will grow tired of the green messages and sustainability efforts out there? Is sustainability just a fad or will it actually continue on?

I thought of this question when I met with a group of conference planners. We're looking at conference themes for 2010 and of course, sustainability came up. But before we put the green stamp on that topic, we had to stop and ponder... will people be tired of it by then?

What do you all think?

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.

Organic Farming

Over the past few weeks, there has been some excitement among groups supportive of organic farming over a bill on food safety that is currently in the house. When I got an email telling me to take action to “Stop the Outlawing of Organic Farming”, the first thing I did was to look up the bill to read it for myself to see if I could figure out what it was about.

If you don’t have legal training, understanding the implications of these things can be hard. Even if you can figure out what they are saying, projecting the possible scenarios that could be a result of the policy is often a stretch, even for well-educated people. After reading the bill along with some interpretations by a few sources that have a record of presenting balanced information (such as the Organic Consumers Association website), my take on this bill is that it is troublesome - not because it might put organic farmers out of business, but because it attempts to address symptoms (food safety problems caused by industrial farming) rather than causes (industrial farming). But how do you fix industrial farming? Industrial farms are typically large corporations; corporations are required by law to make decisions that will profit shareholders. So despite the common perception that global corporations comprise some sort of evil empire, they are only acting as they were meant to do.

But this is an easy fix you say. All we need to do is make a law that forces corporations to consider other things besides profit! If you’ve heard of the triple bottom line - people, planet, profit – you probably understand this as an attempt to do just that. But how do you legislate “people” and “planet”? In our current system, the way to do it is through putting a price on these things so that it becomes unprofitable to exploit people or the environment. This is what cap and trade systems, EPA fines, and other policy-driven approaches have been attempting to do since the 70’s. Unfortunately, a look any any graph that describes the progress of deforestation, depleted fisheries, species extinction, atmospheric carbon, etc. over the last 40 years will tell you that these approaches have not been as effective as we would like them to be.

So the big burning question becomes: why do things keep getting worse when we all really want them to get better? (I’m assuming that for the most part, even the CEO’s of big corporations don’t really want to destroy the planet)

I think its because, as a culture, we’ve delegated our moral and ethical responsibilities to a system that is unable to consider these things in its decision-making processes. Though there may have been good reasons for separating church and state, it may also be that we’ve thrown out the baby with the bathwater by creating a system that separates the valuing of life and community from the profit-making motive. In some ways, it seems to me that the “sustainability movement” is, in effect a new religion that is attempting to instill a collective consciousness that bypasses the legal system and makes it unprofitable for any corporation to disregard the effects of its profit-making on the people and the planet.

Some ways people are doing this are by:

Refusing to buy goods from companies that disregard human rights and cause pollution

Deciding that happiness does not come from purchasing consumer goods but, instead comes from becoming part of and contributing to a thriving and vibrant local community

Becoming less dependant on large corporations by taking personal responsibility for providing ourselves with at least some of the things we need such as by growing our own food or making our own clothes.

So even though the the science and the graphs are terrifying in their implications, I am encouraged by these signs of change and hopeful that the time will soon come when we won’t need to worry about what those corporations are doing because it will be in their best interests to consider the impacts of their decisions on both the people and the planet in order to be profitable.

Spudware or Silverware?

Our campus Dining Services offers the options of spudware and silverware eating utensils. The spudware was introduced as an alternative to plastic utensils, which patrons would use for to-go orders. They are conveniently placed throughout the food service area and are more readily accessible than the regular silverware.

I think this is a great step in the right direction. But, it begins to make me question just which of the two are more ecofriendly? I don't claim to know the facts, but I believe I can ask some insightful questions regarding the pros/cons of each to start a dialogue:

• which one has a more environmentally-friendly manufacturing/production process?
• even though the spudware will biodegrade, it only does so if its composted correctly -- if proper systems aren't in place to ensure this, are we perhaps creating more waste in the landfills?
• supposedly some spudware is highly durable and can be reused -- but is exposing these possibly porous materials to cleaning chemicals potentially harmful to humans?
• let's say silverware is better because its reusable -- but what's the affect on the environment caused by all of the water, energy and chemicals used to clean them?

I think these questions lay the groundwork for a dialogue about the eating utensils issue. And I definitely welcome feedback and insight from the experts out there.