Environmental SurvivalGuide

The idea is simple and based upon the problem that most of the fruit that makes it into our grocery stores is transported great distances (1,000+ miles on average). All this energy, while a large percentage of fruit in people’s backyard simply goes to waste because most homeowners lack the time and interest to properly share or store this food.

Our mission is to directly connect this otherwise wasted fruit with the local markets, processing facilities, and food banks. We also plan to share all our experiences with this service by openly extending this information with the rest of the World. We hope others will adopt our strategy and start similar services in their own community.

If you are interested in more information, please visit Terra Harvest and you will be able to sign up to receive more information via email newsletter. We also want to hear what you think about this and if you have any suggestions to how to connect with others that might be interested in getting started. Please pass along so more like-minded individuals can learn about this project. Your welcome to use any photos from my Virb account for blog posts.

Thanks!

As means of reducing wasteful electrical consumption, Jack Godfrey Wood came up with a design concept for a switch that simply turns off your whole house. Well, maybe everything that doesn’t require a constant electrical source.

This product acts like a hub for all your non-essential circuits so you can easily flip off everything but a few circuits for your needy appliances and electronics that require a constant electrical source (refrigerator, clocks, etc). In doing so, it turns off any of the lights you may have forgotten about.

This product is not yet available for purchase and doesn’t appear to have a specified release date. Alternatively, you can opt for a much more complex wireless home automation system. These systems can provide a similar service through the use of radio frequency switches. I believe that a device like this should be installed into all homes to help remind people of their consumption.

The first upgrade that I did on our home was to try and reduce our electrical consumption by replacing the incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents (CFLs). CFLs use about 75% less energy than a regular incandescent bulb and last about 10 times longer. If every household in the US replaced their 5 most used incandescent bulbs with CFLs, we would save approximately $8 billion each year in energy expenses. This is the equivalent to the emissions of nearly 10 million cars.

This was all the information that I needed to get interested. On my first outing to the hardware store, I returned with a four-pack of CFLs. I thought that I would test them out and see if we could get by without the warm, yellow light. After replacing the four 100-watt incandescent floodlights with 18-watt CFLs, we began to test our comfort to the new blue light. It instantly turned our kitchen into a cold place and I noticed that we kept turning on other nearby incandescants to compensate.

I went back a week or so later to try and read the packaging more carefully to find a CFL that could better match the yellow tone we were used to. I remembered seeing several different varieties and some that were actually covered in a yellow diffuser. I knew there had to be something that could work so I ended up coming home with three different bulbs. All three of these new bulbs had a near perfect yellow hue. One of them seemed to have trouble getting started and would take a short while to get up to full power. I was a bit confused why it did this so I looked a little more closely at the packaging and began to notice a little warning on the back about Mercury content.

This was not the cause of the delay but it did stop me from buying any more CFL bulbs. I didn’t even want to think about how many of these are going to end up leaking in the landfill despite recycling efforts. Will the Mercury content of these new light bulbs end up doing more harm than the emissions caused from powering incandescent bulbs? Michael Richard over at TreeHugger does a reality check on this mercury risk by comparing it to the amount of mercury that is released from burning coal in order to power incandescant bulbs. This is a great bit of information, validating the environmental savings over incandescents. However, I’m still going to look into LED lighting as my next step.

If your still interested in CFLs and you want to learn more about them, you should visit the Lighter Footstep’s Guide to Living with CFLs.  It provides a good overview about how to survive the change.