Living Like Ed by Ed Jr. (whitelam books .txt) 📗

mileage on the highway than they do in city driving, but some hybrid cars get better mileage in the city than they do on the highway. If you commute locally or in stop-and-go traffic, that’s a real benefit.

Why use perfectly good corn that could feed people here and in other countries to make fuel? Save that corn and those soybeans for people, and then turn the waste into biodiesel fuel.

According to the National Resources Defense Council, the use of biofuels—especially cellulosic biofuels—could reduce our annual greenhouse gas emissions by 1.7 billion tons by the year 2050. That’s more than 80 percent of our current transportation related emissions.

Since 40 percent of all car trips are 2 miles or less, it’s really easy to make the change from driving to biking.

Currently, there are no alternative fuels for airplanes, but they could conceivably run on biofuels someday.

One round-trip flight from the United States to Europe will add 3 to 4 tons to your carbon footprint.

According to the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester, CO2 emissions from airplane travel in Britain will surpass those from automobile travel in the next five to seven years.

Driving a hybrid can reduce global-warming pollutants by one-third to one-half.

3

RECYCLING

OLD BECOMES NEW

Nearly everything can be recycled—or reused, which is another wonderful form of recycling. There’s value in just about everything, even that tattered old throw rug. Groups like Freecycle find new uses for old, cast-off items. If you tell members, “I’ve got an old throw rug that’s tattered,” someone may know somebody who can use it. A rescue pet clinic might need something for the dogs to lie around on, for example.

So let’s start with the basics, a sort of Recycling 101, before we get into more detail about how you can recycle and reuse all kinds of different stuff.

         Recycling is Ed’s life. It’s his passion.

When we first decided to move in together, I realized I was going to have to embrace recycling. Every single thing I wanted to dispose of would have to be considered. Could it be recycled? If so, which bin did it go in? (He had a ridiculous number of bins and still does!)

I learned that just about everything you own can be recycled, and my lifestyle had to reflect that. Today, if I want to make a change around the house, that change has to involve recycling. I can put a new rug in my Pilates studio—as long as it’s my old living room rug, cleaned and reused. But what do I do with the nasty old rug that was in the Pilates studio? Ed wanted to give it to Goodwill. But who wants a torn-up old rug?

Eventually, Ed agreed, but he still said, “If anyone thinks this is going in a landfill, they’re out of their mind. Maybe the fiber can be used for something. Fiber has value.”

To Ed, everything is potentially something else. I never under-estimate Ed when it comes to recycling. He’ll always find a way.

Why Recycle?

Recycling is important for a number of reasons. First and foremost, there’s energy to be saved in most recycling programs, aluminum being at the head of the class, the top of the heap.

When you think about it, just back-of-the-envelope calculation will bring you to the same point that every study does: It takes so much less energy to mine our aluminum on our street corners and in our alleys and at our recycling centers than it does to travel to Jamaica, use large John Deere or Caterpillar equipment to mine bauxite, to refine the ore, to take it to a smelter, to bring it to the United States, and to fabricate it into a can. That’s a number—all that work and all that energy is a number. Now, what’s the other number, to have curbside recycling bins and recycling centers all across the country, where you can mine the very pure form of bauxite known as aluminum and use a minimal amount of energy to make that into a new can?

Another very important point: The idea of using these perfectly wonderful resources—be they petroleum, bauxite, or any other resource—to make different things, then to throw those things in this big toxic soup known as a landfill, only to have to go get more resources and use them up is crazy to me. Recycling saves a tremendous amount of natural resources.

Landfills

The other issue is: Where does all this stuff go?

“Honey, throw that away.” “Sweetie, can you throw this away for me?”

Where is away? Away is just someone else’s backyard.

Landfills serve us the way the portrait served Dorian Gray. They allow us to cavort in an orgy of consumerism until the final day of reckoning—which is yesterday or today, depending on where you live.

You can call a landfill other things. They call it a sanitary landfill. They call it a dump— a more appropriate name, I suppose, because people want to just dump stuff on someone else and sweep it under the rug.

But it ultimately doesn’t do a very good job. All landfills leak. It’s not just solid matter that’s thrown in a landfill. There are liquids, too, and a lot of them are toxic. Rightly or wrongly, people do throw toxic substances in a landfill. I say “rightly or wrongly,” but of course it’s very wrong. That’s why there are hazardous waste drop-off sites and hazardous waste pickup days. People should take advantage of that, but do they? Absolutely not. Sadly, they throw their half-used can of cleaning solution, the old can of paint they don’t need anymore, their batteries, their old computer monitor, right into a trash can, where it is picked up and mixed together with all the other allowable waste and sent off to a landfill.

What happens next? It rains. Of course, the people who build and manage landfills are very careful. They put a cap on the top of the landfill,