Eco-Chick · The modern girl's guide to living green & fabulous.

You Might Be an Eco Chick If…..

My wonderfully grey kitty, Penelope, who actually allows me to leave the heat off by keeping my lap warm while I blog, so I think she might have a negative carbon footprint!

……..you get embarassed when you absolutely HAVE to buy a bottled water one night after closing down a bar in the East Village. Severely dehydrated, and sloshed, you have so much guilt about buying water that you tell the bodega owner and the guy you’re hanging out with ALL about how bottled water is evil. Double d’oh!

……..your basement is filled with things that you haven’t figured out how to recycle yet. But you WON’T get rid of them until you do!

……..you’re so eagerly awaiting a trip to the farmer’s market, you’ve already picked out which cute cloth bags you’ll be taking with you. And the market’s two days away.

……..you’ve actually wondered about your cat’s carbon footprint.

This is the fifth post in an ongoing series (of my green neuroses!) Others linked below:

Read You Might Be #4 here

Read You Might Be #3 here

Read You Might Be #2 here

Read the Original You Might Be here

After reading through these I realize I think I have a recycling fetish! Is that bad?

Which Cars Win First Prize in Green? Greenopia's Got the Deets

Guest Post By Ayana Meade

According to the newly-released Greenopia Green Care Guide, the top three most eco-friendly cars on the market today are:
1. the Toyota Prius
2. the Honda Civic Hybrid
3. the Jetta Clean Diesel.

All three had incredibly high gas mileage and burned cleanly to boot. To see the top ten cars in the list, check this out, there’s some surprises in the full rundown!

Two pleasant surprises were the performances of Audi and Mazda. Both did relatively well in the Greenopia Automaker Guide (which rates the overall performance of auto manufacturers), as they both had a statistically large number of cars that met at least our minimum criteria for the Automobile Guide.

When buying your next car, keep in mind that just because a car is a hybrid doesn’t mean it’s automatically better for the environment. In fact, largely because of its battery, the hybrid carries a larger environmental production burden. Where the hybrid makes up ground is once it is driven, with its superior mileage and emissions. On balance Toyota estimates that it takes about 12,000 miles before a hybrid and a similar traditional engine car ‘break even’ environmentally (the hybrid is greener from that point on), as long as it gets great mileage and burns cleanly.

Since your choice of transportation is second only to your home’s energy use in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, driving less or not at all is of course the ideal way to reduce your carbon footprint, but if you’re like many and need a car to get around in today’s fast paced world, then this guide can help you choose wisely.

About the Greenopia Greener Cars Guide: The Guide uses Greenopia’s EPA-recognized 4-Leaf rating system, and only the top 100 automobiles readily available in the US made the cut—the good news is that they come in all kinds of price points and styles. Fuel-efficiency, manufacturing materials, EPA SmartWay vehicle emissions and proxy data representing manufacturing processes were among the criteria data that were analyzed by the Greenopia research team to come up with the ratings.

Help Fight Chocolate Extinction!

First the honeybees (and duh, the honey) and now chocolate is on the decline? Say it ain’t so!!

According to this CNN article on the subject of chocolate extinction, “Yields are declining all across the cocoa plantations of West Africa, where two thirds of the world’s supply is grown, as soils are degraded and the area able to support the crop retreats>”

But wait, there’s a solution!

I only eat fair-trade chocolate made from organic cocoa beans- and you should too! Not only does it taste soooooo much better, it prevents the very situation that’s degrading the land where cocoa beans are grown. The deal is that to make money (and cheap chocolate), farmers in Ghana and other chocolate-growing countries have to take down the rainforest and plant cocoa bean plants in unnatural ways. And what happens when you mess with Mother Nature?

The problem is that cocoa is naturally a rainforest plant that grows in shady conditions surrounded by a high biodiversity, but recently hybrid varieties have been grown on cleared land as mono-cultures and in full sun.

While this will give higher short term yields, the soil quickly becomes degraded and the lifespan of plants can be cut from 75 or 100 years, to 30 or less. When the trees die and the land is exhausted the farmers must move on and clear more rainforest to plant cocoa.

No chocolate (horrors!) AND no rainforest (probably worse-no, I admit, definitely worse).

Three of my favorites are pictured above (and don’t forget, dark chocolate is healthier than milk and because it’s vegan, it has a lower carbon footprint), so stick to organic, fair trade dark chocolates, which support healthy growing conditions for cocoa plants- and for the people that farm them.

TRY: Divine Chocolate (from an awesome worker-owned cooperative, this stuff is AMAZING!)
Green and Black’s (crazy yummy flavors like Ginger)
Trader Joe’s house brand (my fave is with pecans and raisins)

Yes, they are more expensive- chocolate is a treat and should be labor-intensive to grow if done properly. So eat less of it, and enjoy it more! Commercial chocolate tastes like wax flavored with old cocoa beans swept off the floor of a Dickensian factory (probably I’m not far off). Hey, if we don’t save the chocolate, think about what’s left!! CAROB. ‘Nuf said.

Eco-Hunk: David Suzuki

David Suzuki is a Canadian hero, one of our top 10 Canadians even. He is best known for his television show The Nature Of Things airing across the world. He is a scientists and avid environmentalist. In 1990 he founded the David Suzuki Foundation which as the mission of finding a balance in the environment around us in our everyday lives.

Dr. Suzuki has his PhD in Zoology from the University of Chicago. He worked as a professor at the University of British Columbia for over 40 years until his retirement, but can still be found doing a packed lecture every now and then. He has been awarded 22 honorary degrees. Due to his love for the environment he isn’t found in too many different places. Although he purchases carbon credits his touring puts him tonnes over his carbon footprint. Thus he has stopped vacationing and attempts to appear by video conference as often as possible. His university tour of 2008 comprised of UBC and McGill.

He has been a very vocal in the fight against climate change. He has claimed that Canada should be international outlaws for reneging on Kyoto and that scientists who deny climate change are funded by big corporations. Suzuki is disgusted by these scientists who are funded from inappropriate sources because it is these skeptics and deniers that aren’t allowing the public to be convinced that climate change is an extremely pressing issue of our days.

Suzuki’s most recent big news campaign is his Nature Challenge, which I urge you all to take a look at and join. What is the challenge? It’s all pretty simple. The way you travel, what you eat, the energy you use and public action. Way to implement the challenge into your life are outlined here. Most of the thing are things that a lot of us will already do – but it’s good to reevaluate your life and see where you can improve. I for one and shutting the computer off at night, and turning the heat in the house down a couple degrees. Sure – it takes longer for me to check my email in the morning because the CP isn’t just on, and I’m slightly colder but it’s not doing me any harm.

Check the nature challenge out! David Suzuki is someone I look up to so much. He has devoted his entire life to spreading the word about climate change. He lived a hard life as a prisoner of war in Canada, but has moved on to become one of the greatest environmentalists of our time. Love!

Nature Kids, Hot Water Woes, and Pellet Stoves

I want my child to connect with nature, but how can a suburban park be designed to both protect visitors from Lyme disease–carrying ticks and restore the natural ecosystem?
—Lena Crandall, Scarsdale, NY

The funny thing about wildlife (even the kind that finds its way into parks and playgrounds in developed areas) is that it’s wild and therefore not completely controllable. In order to eliminate Lyme disease–carrying ticks, you would have to ban all warm-blooded animals and pave over the greenery. Still, you wouldn’t be creating an optimal environment for children. “In a matter of a few decades kids’ interactions with nature have been reduced significantly compared with all of human history,” says Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods. “A new body of evidence suggests getting kids out-
side, which engages all the senses, leads to a longer attention span, increases in cognitive development, and [reduces] stress.”

So unless you want your child to grow up playing in a parking lot, the best way to avoid deer ticks is prevention. “You can’t really prevent ticks from being in outdoor areas, but you can be proactive about your own actions,” says Beth Herr, pro-
gram director at New York’s Westchester County Parks Department. (New York had more cases of Lyme disease in 2006 than any other state.) “Be sure that you tuck your pants into your socks, wear light-colored clothing, and check yourself and your child for ticks right after using outdoor facilities.”
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I’m considering buying a tankless water heater. With all their great energy-saving features, why haven’t these systems caught on?
—Louis Weiss, Berkeley, CA

Whoever invented the storage water heaters most of us have in our homes today must have been thinking of how best to waste energy instead of save it. Think about it: Conventional systems keep water warmed to skin-scrubbing temps 24/7 even though hot water is needed for only an hour or two a day. Tankless (or demand) types do just the opposite: Water is heated instantly when you turn on the shower. Since roughly 13 percent of a home’s energy is used for this purpose, making the switch to a tankless kind could save an average of about $180 a year, and also help reduce your family’s carbon footprint.

If you choose a natural gas–burning model, it will use about 30 percent less energy than an electric one, and you can up the efficiency even more by picking a unit with an intermittent ignition rather than a constantly burning pilot light. (Two companies that sell such models are Bosch and Takagi.)

You will also save water. “You don’t need to run the shower waiting for the hot water, which wastes an average of five gallons every time you do it,” says Claudia Chandler, assis-
tant executive director for the California Energy Commission.

So why haven’t these caught on? Tankless heaters supply two to five gallons of water a minute, which might not be enough when you want to take a shower and run the dishwasher at the same time. A simple solution is to just add another unit. You will never run out of water completely, as with other heaters. While a tankless unit might be more expensive up front, you will save so much on your electricity bill it could pay for itself in as little as two years. You might also enjoy a windfall come April 15. The federal government and many states (see Energy Star and DSIRE) now offer rebates and tax deductions for energy-efficient appliances, including a $300 credit for certain tankless water heaters installed between January 1, 2007, and December 31, 2007.
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I might start heating my home with wood pellets. Is this a sustainable resource?
—Jon Bradford, Lancaster, PA

What could be cozier than the smell of wood smoke drifting over a snowy landscape? Until the early 1900s, 90 percent of Americans heated their homes with wooden logs, which are a renewable resource, since trees can be planted to replace those cut for fuel. When fossil fuels became cheaper and more widely available, many people switched from the messy fires that needed constant stoking to furnaces that burned oil or natural gas (which are both finite, nonrenewable fuels).

Concerns about global warming, rising fuel prices, and ground-level air pollution have led some homeowners to rethink how they heat their homes, and wood is slowly making a comeback. Unfortunately, traditional wood stoves and fireplaces contribute to local air pollution, since they produce particulates (few older stoves have an air smoke filter), and they can be high maintenance to keep going. Stoves that run on pellets instead of logs are cleaner and require less upkeep (picture a bag of half-inch-long pellets instead of logs).

The fuel for these stoves is also sustainable, as most pellets are made of compacted sawdust, waste paper, and bark, all by-products of the paper, agriculture, or lumber industries. Sawdust wood pellets produce the least amount of ash. Some stoves can also burn other biofuels, including soybeans, corn kernels, nutshells, barley, and cherry pits, that might otherwise end up in landfills. But make sure your stove can handle alternative fuels before trying them.

You might also have an energy auditor or certified provider come check out your house to see what size stove you need based on the area you want to heat and how well it is insu-
lated. Most pellet stoves do need to be plugged in to run their fans and controls; you can expect to use about $9 worth of electricity per month. Setup for a pellet stove is faster than for a wood stove, and about half the price. Although a pellet stove costs considerably more than a wood stove ($1,700 to $3,000 compared with $400 to $700), the pellet stove could pay for itself in as little as four years.

From my column “Green Guru” at Audubon Magazine.