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Green in Paris

So I think I have used up my allotment of fossil fuels for at least the remainder of this year, or more likely the next decade. Why? My husband surprised me with a birthday trip to Paris last weekend.

Americans have a love/hate relationship with the French. So of course as an American and a “greenist,” I had to do some hardcore observations of Parisian “green” habits and compare them to what we do here. What I discovered from my four days in the “City of Lights” is as follows.

(1) Recycling
There is a recycling program in place in Paris, but I am not sure if the Parisians are interested. On some streets they have huge recycling bins for bottles and cans, but most of them were covered with graffiti (which happens to be all over the city). In the parks, they have recycling bags next to the the garbage bags but as you can see in the picture, recyclables are also placed in the garbage bag. On a walking tour the Marais, I asked our tour guide about how well Parisians recycle. She said they are horrible and during our tour she opened a recycling bin from an apartment building to show us what she meant. It was filled with recyclables and non-recyclables.

(2) Reusables
My husband and I went in a few supermarkets (which I love to do whenever I travel abroad), and outdoor markets and I think I saw maybe 5 people using reusable bags. The worst was in the outdoor markets where you can buy fruits, vegetables, meats, cheese, bread, fish, flowers and much more. The biggest one we went to was in Versailles, and everything was put in a plastic bag. Many did bring their own reusable totes but those bags were then stuffed with plastic bags. It appeared to me that they may use more plastic bags than we use.

(3) Transportation
Paris is a very busy city with lot of traffic. But I would not say that they have any more traffic then New York City. They do drive smaller, and most likely, more efficient cars (I didn’t see one Hummer or SUV) and many people ride bikes and take the subway. I think more people ride bikes in Paris then they do in Manhattan–but not as many as in Beijing. But the most ingenious thing that we observed in Paris was a bike rental system called Velib. The system began in July 2007, with 10,000 bikes, and now they are up to 20,000 bikes all over Paris. Riders can buy monthly, daily or hourly passes to rent bikes stationed at more than 1,400 automated stations across the city. A bike can be rented from one station and returned to another. From what we saw, and from the doubling of the number of bikes in use, it appears that the Parisians love the system. My husband and I wished we had more time to try it out. Its funny, the first few days in Paris we weren’t sure what these bikes were. Initially we thought they were motorized, then we didn’t understand the rental system. By the time we figured out what was what it was it was time to go. I wonder if this would work in NYC?

(4) Food
You should know that I have an obsession with food. Our trip to Paris had some gastronomic highs–the picnic in Versailles– and some lows–dinner at Chez Andre off the Champs-Elysées. So of course I had to find out where the French food comes from. I think this is a department that they really do better than we do. French farmers say no to GMO’s –they even strike and riot to oppose them on a semi-regular basis. None of the fruits or vegetables grown in France are from genetically modified seeds. NONE! We can’t say anything like that here. You can also find organic produce in Paris. We spoke to some butchers and they insisted that none of the meat is treated with antibiotics or hormones and that beef is grass-fed. One of the butchers we spoke with even made a stink face when referring to grain fed beef. I could not find anywhere on the internet to confirm or deny this so I have to take their word, for now. I did ask Shannon Hayes, a grass-fed beef farmer from Sap Bush Farms and author of The Farmer and the Grill and she said “It is my understanding is that not all meat in France is grass-fed. But a fair amount is. Quite often it depends on the breed – charolais beef, for example, is supposed to be exclusively raised on grass. When I was there I saw a lot of cattle grazed and fed in the barn – a model that is infinitely more sustainable than factory farms, but not, according to our strict definitions, grass-fed. The meat is also much more likely to be raised on small farms, not from confinement facilities.”

So what do I take from my trip to Paris?

Eco Chick News Tweets!

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How The Media Abandoned the Environment, at new techie-with-a-heart-of-green EcoTechDaily.

Check Chris Baskind’s op/ed on the lack of environmental coverage in mainstream media:

No, you’re not imagining things.

With U.S. gasoline prices edging toward $4.00 a gallon; oil prices at an all-time high, demand for materials such as copper outstripping demand; worldwide food shortages; major cities running short on water; Antarctic ice sheets crumbling into the Southern Ocean; and continued uncertainty over our climatological future, you’d think the environment would be front-and-center on the evening news. And you’d be wrong.

14 New Species Discovered in Brazil, from The Daily Green

Dan Shapely reports that there are indeed new things under the sun (at least to humans). Check the gorg flipbook!:

….at the top of the Serra Geral in Brazil’s Cerrado region, where 14 new species have been discovered during an expedition to the wooded savanna.

Another new Bike Chic page (I keep writing about this subject; check it here and here) and Carectomy has found another one!

If full body Spandex isn’t your speed, check out Cycle Chic, a London-based blog that offers tips on how to look devastatingly hot (wear designer pants from Stella McCartney, or your boyfriend’s t-shirt), stay sweat-free (don’t go too fast and sport a light, summery dress), and “cycle yourself slim,” all while biking to your intended destination.

Bike to Work Week 2008!

Grab your bike out of the garage because May is national Bike Month and Bike to Work Day 2008 is on May 15 in the Bay area! If you sign up to pledge that you’ll ride your bike to work on this day, you’ll be entered to win a new bike! There will also be “energizer stations” in every county which will be giving out tote bags + treats to riders.

For Bike Month events in other cities/states check out the League of American Bicyclists site.

Be a Cycle Hottie!

Keeping warm in colder weather without looking like a North Face refugee

We all know riding your bike instead of driving is not only eco-friendly, but good for our butts and legs (and hearts!) too! But to really make a dent in how many global warming gases you produce, you have to ride your bike for more than just recreation, and treat it as a vehicle, and integrate it into your life.

I ride my bike all over my seaside Connecticut town, as do plenty of other folks, the difference being that I don’t ever dress like a ‘biker’. I hate the spandex, helmets, and stupid bootie-shoes that Americans seem to think they need to ride a bike around town or on the streets. (Yeah, I know, helmets will save your skull, but you know what? I’m old enough that I don’t have to wear one, so I don’t. They’re ugly and mess up my hair. So sue me.)

A great example of a great warmer weather bike ensemble!

Turns out, I’m not as iconoclastic as I’d like to think I am. European ladies in cities like Amsterdam, Paris, and Copenhagen regularly ride their bikes, looking as chic as ever. Women wear whatever they would normally wear (read: really chic outfits and heels, jewelry, and even makeup!) to hop on their bikes to get around town. The site, Copenhagen Cycle Chic, documents this style phenomenon. Love it!

I ride in skirts and tights with knee-high boots in the winter to go to the library, sundresses with bare feet or flip flops in the summer to ride to my local beach, and my cute bags get thrown in the basket in front of me. Just make sure your bike has fenders so you don’t get dust and mud all over your adorable outfits!

Cologne's New Smog Control

I live in a city with its own special breed of traffic jams – traffic that gets so snarled, it has its own label: stau. Cologne, a city of 1 million people, its geography divided in two by the Rhine River, can sometimes have traffic so backed up that it’s faster to bike across the bridge than to hop into a car.

What’s amazing about this traffic is just how unnecessary it is. With subways and railways that stretch into every crevice of the nearby suburbs and neighboring cities (Duesseldorf and Bonn are less than 30 minutes by train, though I wouldn’t dare call them suburbs of this city for fear of flogging), you can often get door to door faster by train than by car. As home to Europe’s largest train station, too, you can get nearly anywhere on the continent at any time (my New Year’s trip to Paris was cut from 5-1/2 hours by car to 4 hours by the 200 km/hour Thalys train).

Still, people – especially those on the outskirts of the city, are attached to their cars. So starting on January 1, the city of Cologne implemented a new commuting policy to help combat emissions. Though it doesn’t limit the number of cars allowed into the city (a dream of mine since the first time I tried to ride my bike through the city center) and it’s not the same as the toll system London and now Milan have introduced, it does keep the heavy polluters out of the city.

Now, in order to drive into Cologne, you have to have a sticker saying your car is not a polluting vehicle. This is more than just an emissions test… it ranks the levels of emissions that technically road-worthy vehicles produce (I say technically because I’d never consider a 4-wheeler a proper vehicle, but they are allowed out of the woods here, don’t ask me why). Which means autos that pass looser emissions tests in the ‘burbs may not be allowed into the city. Not ever. And those that are on the borderline may not be allowed in on smoggy days. Though in an ideal world, those cars wouldn’t be spitting their smoke out in the suburbs either, I’m happy that my hometown’s doing a bit more to clear the air.

FYI – For all those arguing against a similar policy in the States, in the first week of the pass’s usage, the staus didn’t increase and everyone still got to work on time. Fighting smog this way isn’t as problematic as you might think.

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