Living Like Ed

by Ed Begley, Jr.

  So buying recycled isn’t just good for the environment, it’s good for your lifestyle. You don’t have to waste time or money stripping your picket fence or your deck and refinishing it every couple of years.

  Natural and Recycled Furniture

  You can also find different kinds of recycled furniture. First off, there’s used furniture. When you buy a piece that already exists, you cut down on the amount of furniture being made, which cuts down on energy use. It cuts down on trees being felled and then turned into lumber. It cuts down on the energy used to truck that lumber to a manufacturing facility. And it cuts down on the energy used to truck that finished furniture to a warehouse and then to a store. Who knew antiquing could be so good for the earth, right?

  When I decorate my home, I try to make it personal and not look like it came straight out of a furniture catalog. It doesn’t take a lot of money to add your own personal touches. In fact, I like shopping at flea markets to find unique items. And I’m recycling at the same time.

  There’s another environmentally sound option, too. You can purchase new furniture that’s made from recycled materials. Manufacturers have found ways to take used wood, used metal, and other used materials and transform them into completely new pieces. There’re even companies making outdoor garden furniture from recycled plastic lumber.

  If you do decide to buy brand-new furniture—stuff that’s not recycled—at least make sure it’s made from natural products, like wood. By cutting down on the use of plastic and other new synthetic materials, you save oil and other fuels.

  And speaking of wood, look for furniture made from sustainable wood. Rather than using old-fashioned clear-cutting techniques that decimate forests and wildlife, companies that offer sustainable-wood products maintain the health and productivity of forests and their ecosystems. You can find furniture made from sustainable wood at very mainstream retailers, like Ikea. And if you want to build your own furniture, you can find wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council in stores like Lowe’s and Home Depot.

  Recycled Countertops

  I’ve been wanting to redo the kitchen in our little house for a long time. So I started small. I found a company that makes countertops out of recycled glass. I thought Ed would like that. But first he was more concerned with what would happen to the ugly old tile that was already on our countertops. With Ed, it’s all about where’s it going. It’s really not the money he’s worried about. The reason we never upgrade around here is because he’s all concerned about creating waste.

  Fortunately, we discovered that we were having a positive effect on the environment. We were keeping far more glass out of a landfill than the waste we were creating with that ugly old tile. And who knows, the company that installed our counters may even have a way to recycle the old materials they remove. Wouldn’t that be great?

  This stuff we used for our new countertops is called Vetrazzo, and it’s made from many different things. Recycled Coke bottles, recycled traffic-light lenses, recycled glass of every form. They use different materials to come up with different colors and designs. I think it’s a creative way to take objects that most would consider trash and turn them into something functional and beautiful. Vetrazzo’s material is very visually appealing, and it’s recycled, so it’s good on many counts.

  The countertop that Rachelle and I ended up choosing is called Hollywood Sage, and it’s made from broken-up soda bottles. Over a thousand bottles were used just to make the countertop for our small kitchen. So we actually wound up taking a lot of glass out of the waste stream. And I feel good about that.

  Precycling

  There’s recycling, which is very important. And then there’s precycling, which is every bit as important. When I’m shopping, if there’s one package for razor blades that’s a foot long for a little tiny thing of blades, and there’s another package that’s smaller, I’m always going to buy the smaller one. At certain stores, you can buy five containers of razor blades in one package. Whatever you can do to reduce the amount of packaging you buy—by buying in bulk, by buying things in the smallest amount of packaging possible—is really huge.

  And when they say, “Paper or plastic?” at the grocery store checkout line, the answer is always “Neither.” Pull out your canvas bag or string bag. If you don’t have either, reuse your old paper or plastic bags. Most places that I shop at give you a nickel per bag credit for bringing your bags back—canvas, plastic, or paper—giving us a financial incentive to recycle.

  So buy things with the least amount of packaging, and don’t take any new paper or plastic bags. I keep canvas bags in the trunk of my car so that I have them whenever I decide to stop at the store.

  Naysayers will say it takes energy to make these canvas bags, too, but I’ve got canvas bags from the ’80s. These bags last a long time.

  Sometimes you just have to choose paper or plastic. Now that I have a business, Begley’s Best, some people just insist on getting a plastic bag so they can buy a product and then carry the bottle around the city market where I sell it. Most people, however, bring their own plastic bags when they come and buy my stuff. They know me enough to do that. Forget about knowing me—they just do it because they know it’s a good idea. But when people want me to give them a plastic bag to carry one, two, sometimes three plastic bottles at a farmers’ market, I have thousands of them. I have friends save bags for me. The bags have to be clean. They can’t have crushed tomatoes at the bottom of them, obviously. I save those bags and then I reuse them.

  Here’s another great way you can precycle. We buy kitty litter in bulk, and then we just keep bringing back the same big pail and refilling it. It’s a huge pail, and it’s got two different UPC codes on it. There’s one that the cashier scans the first time you buy the pail, and then there’s another code to scan for a refill. So I just keep bringing back this same pail—it’s a five-year-old pail at this point, easily—and that way I don’t buy any new packaging for kitty litter. I have two of these pails, so when one is empty, I’ll put it out by the car so I know to bring it into Petco. And I just go to the big bin there with the scooper and fill it up again.

  Here’s another good one. I’ve heard that plastic water bottles are really bad for you. We put them in our cars, and then they heat up and the plastic gets into our water. That can’t be good for us. And then there are just all these little water bottles everywhere, and they don’t break down.

  But there’s a new water bottle, available from New Wave Enviro (newwaveenviro.com). It’s made of corn. It’s biodegradable, so it will break down in nature. And it has this filter. It costs $10—it’s a pricey little water bottle. However, you can refill it and it can filter tap water. You just have to wash it, and you have ninety fills. Ninety!

  Look how much packaging you save just by buying this one water bottle—and it’s keeping toxic chemicals out of your body at the same time.

  Saving paper also fits into this category called precycling. To save paper, I pay bills online. Companies are making it easier for you, too. They don’t want to get a piece of paper in the mail and pay a person to open it. It’s so much easier to have one person point and click than six people with letter openers doing all that work.

  They have online bill-pay programs that you can certainly do through your bank nowadays. Moreover, you don’t even have to point and click. It’s just taken out automatically—your mortgage payment every month, your cell phone, gas, you name it. You can approve them—for example, Cingular Wireless or Time Warner Cable—and they post it; others show you, like “Here’s your bill, so you make sure we’re not going to charge you $1,200 by accident. It’s the same as it was last month, some $124 for a premium package. And here’s your cellular bill for your wife’s phone and yours. If you don’t like it, click here. And if you do like it, you do nothing.” They just take it out of your account. There’s more and more of that, and it’s easy to do.

  Also, I do as much as I can by e-mail. Most people do that today. I t
ry to generate as little paper as possible.

  Another great thing you can do: If you pack a sack lunch, don’t use plastic sandwich bags. Pack things in glass or plastic containers. Then you can reuse your own containers over and over and over again.

  Rechargeable Batteries

  Another way you can reduce waste is by choosing rechargeable batteries instead of disposables. I’ve been using rechargeable batteries since 1978, and I’m glad they’re good for the environment. That’s the reason I did it. But what I quickly learned is that they’re really good for my pocketbook. I wasn’t buying as many Duracells, as many Energizers, as many Rayovacs. I just wasn’t buying as many batteries.

  Back in those days, the rechargeable batteries were nickel-cadmium. Cadmium, of course, is an element that has to be disposed of properly. I never once threw one in the trash. I would save them and take them to the hazardous waste disposal site.

  I must say, those old rechargeable batteries would conk out on you much quicker than today’s batteries. Today’s batteries, as we know, are much more advanced. They’re nickel-metal hydride, they’re lithium-ion batteries. They work much better.

  Why? Because, sadly, those old nickel-cadmium batteries were like people. They remembered how you treated them. If you didn’t fully charge or discharge them, they didn’t like that, and they never got a full charge again. So nobody’s buying nickel-cadmium for anything anymore.

  The standard has long since changed to nickel-metal hydride, and now you can get even more watts per kilogram from lithium-ion and others, like lithium-titanate batteries, which are wonderful.

  I’m working with a company called Altairnano, which has these wonderful lithium-titanate batteries that don’t have the challenges that other lithium-ion batteries have. They don’t heat up. They just don’t have those safety and other problems. Those are the batteries in my Phoenix Motorcars electric truck, and I’m hoping they’ll become available for other applications soon.

  Rechargeable batteries in general are just much better than nonrechargeable ones because all batteries are toxic. But rechargeable batteries last longer. They’re better for the environment in that way, and they put money in your pocket.

  People say, “Oh, these rechargeable batteries, they’re toxic!”

  What is a Duracell? An Energizer? A Rayovac? These have toxic elements, too. You can’t throw those in the trash. But people feel very free to throw those little Coppertops away. You can’t throw them away. They’re toxic. You’re supposed to dispose of them properly. And see how quickly you fill up a shoe box with batteries if you’re not buying rechargeable.

  Beyond that, you have options that require no batteries at all. As we’ve known for many, many years, you can store power in a capacitor. I have these flashlights that I sell on my website. You shake them up. It’s the Faraday principle: A magnet passes through the coil, and electrons are generated. But where are those electrons stored? In a battery? No, not in this device. They’re stored in a capacitor. And so you turn on the light—which is not a lightbulb; it’s an LED, a light-emitting diode—and you have wonderful light whenever you need it. And it’s stored not in a battery, which will wear out over time, but in a capacitor, which has a far, far longer life expectancy. So it’s a much better choice for something you’d need in an emergency—like a flashlight—and for so many other reasons. It’s another very good way to go.

  So Many Ways to Recycle

  So now we’ve come up with dozens—if not hundreds—of things that you can recycle. Glass jars and their lids. Cardboard boxes. Laundry detergent bottles. Eyeglasses. Newspapers. Aluminum cans. Toys. Even a tattered old throw rug. And we’ve come up with dozens more recycled products that you can buy. Things you’d buy anyway, without even having to choose recycled products—things like cans of soda and bottles of juice, like a newspaper. And then there are all those things you can specifically seek out that are made using postconsumer waste, such as recycled office paper and file folders and toilet paper and outdoor furniture.

  All of these recycling efforts provide benefits on so many levels. They reduce the amount of stuff going into landfills. They reduce the need to use up new natural resources. And they reduce the amount of energy spent mining those resources—often in distant locales—and the amount of energy spent transporting those resources to the United States to be made into whatever it is we think we need.

  So now let’s take a look at energy from a different angle. Let’s look at ways to create energy in an environmentally friendly manner, as well as ways to reduce your need for energy from outside sources.

  When an aluminum can gets recycled and made into a new can, it can wind up back on a grocery store shelf in just 90 days. Now that’s efficient.

  A landfill is a place to sweep waste conveniently under the rug.

  Another sad side effect of landfills is their impact on wildlife

  Nowadays, it’s cheaper to replace a lot of things than it is to repair them.

  Today, there are nearly nine thousand curbside recycling programs across the United States. And as a nation, we recycle 32 percent of our waste.

  While there may be inefficiencies in recycling programs, the solution is to make each and every recycling program more efficient.

  Just because some-thing can’t go in your curbside recycling bin doesn’t mean it can’t be recycled.

  All kinds of thing can’t go in your curbside recycling bin doesn’t mean it can’t be recycled. All kinds of resources make it possible to recycle almost everything.

  Recycling just one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a television set for three hours. Steel recycling saves enough energy each year to provide a year’s worth of electricity for about one-fifth of all U.S. house holds.

  Recycling just a single glass jar or bottle saves enough energy to light a standard 100-watt lightbulb for four hours.

  If every single morning newspaper in the United States were recycled, we’d save 41,000 trees a day. And we’d avoid sending 6 million tons of waste to landfills.

  Each year, Americans generate 1.6 million tons of household hazardous waste.

  According to the EPA, 50 percent of all paper, 34 percent of all plastic soft drink bottles, 45 percent of all aluminum beer and soft drink cans, 63 percent of all steel packaging, and 67 percent of all major appliances are now recycled.

  The idea is to recycle things in a way that they’ll actually get used at the highest level possible, so you can save the most natural resources and the most energy.

  Americans buy more than 85 million tons of paper per year. That’s about 700 pounds per person.

  Save your old laser printer cartridges. They can be recycled, refilled, or rebuilt—stores like Staples will even give you a few dollars’ credit for bringing in your empties.

  The caps for most plastic containers are not made from the same type of plastic as the containers themselves, so you should remove the caps before recycling the containers. Never dump hazardous waste—or any trash—into your city’s storm drains. What goes into most of these drains flows untreated into rivers, lakes, or oceans.

  Check to see if your city has a special program after the holidays to recycle Christmas trees into mulch, which is then given or sold to people for use in their gardens.

  4

  * * *

  ENERGY

  SUN, WIND, COAL, WATER—WHERE DOES YOUR ELECTRICITY COME FROM?

  * * *

  Most people get the electricity for their home—or their business—from their local utility company. They pay the going rate, and they use what they need. They may take steps to reduce their energy use, like implementing some of the techniques I covered in Chapter 1, “Home.” But people typically don’t even know they have a choice when it comes to how their electricity is produced and by whom.

  Well, I’m here to tell you: You do have a choice. Actually, you have a lot of choices. You can produce your own electricity, as I do using solar panels and a wind turbine mounted on the roof of
my home. You can even sell some of the excess electricity you produce back to your local utility company.

  But what if you don’t own your home? What if you’re on a tight budget? Or what if you live in a restrictive community that has rules against things like solar panels on your roof? Well, there are other options. For instance, you can still buy electricity from your local utility company, but you can choose to participate in a green power program. And if your local electric company doesn’t have such a program, you may be able to switch to another provider that does.

  And even beyond all that—whether you do all of the above or none of the above—you can take steps to offset any carbon dioxide emissions produced by the electricity you do use.

  And that brings us to the heart of the matter. Every source of electricity has consequences; it affects the environment. It’s just that some sources of electricity are more environmentally friendly—actually a lot more environmentally friendly—than others.

  How Electricity Is Produced

  Let’s start by looking at all the different ways electricity is produced. The most common is by burning things to create heat, which in turn creates steam. That steam is then used to turn a big turbine, and that generates electricity.

  A lot of different materials are burned to create electricity, including

  • coal (still the primary way utility companies create power in the United States)

  • crude oil

  • natural gas

  • garbage

  • biomass (which is typically waste from the manufacturing of paper and pulp products)