Human beings are one of the few species that leave non-biodegradable waste products in their wake. The problems resulting from this imbalance are older than civilization itself; evidence suggests that some stone-age communities were actually forced out of their cave dwellings by their own ash heap.

But the small town of Kamikatsu, located in one of the most remote and mountainous regions of Japan, is looking to tackle the millennia-old problem through an extensive, nearly-omnipresent system of waste management that, at least nominally, achieves its goal of zero waste.  The root of the program seems to be focusing the responsibility for garbage collection down to the individual household. There are no trash pickups in Kamikatsu, and each household creates and manages its own organic compost bin. 

For leftover plastics, metals, industrial oils and other non-compostible materials, residents must carry their own waste to a garbage center, where it’s sorted into one of the 34 individual disposal categories. Larger bins are set out for oversized metal wastes, and cardboard and newspapers are stacked separately rather than composted for easy recycling. It’s a sweeping, all-inclusive, top-down approach to waste management. 

I’ll admit that on paper, there are tremendous incentives for a municipality to take on such a massive project. Cost savings in garbage collection alone would be massive, while having smaller, non-overflowing landfills leaves more space available for other civic projects. Plus the untold tons of recyclable materials created by the project create an important additional source of income for the community.

The only problem is, people don’t like it. Even in a small town like Kamikatsu, some 40 percent of the population is not in favor of the project. Larger towns and cities in places with more individualistic and freewheeling social norms would be hard pressed to enforce such an aggressive plan without ending up with a full-scale revolt. Just the logistics of coordinating collection centers so that the entire population of a full-sized American city could drop off and separate their garbage each day, one car at a time, are daunting. 

It seems to me that the best implementation is some sort of middle ground between an authoritarian program and the current, rather laissez faire approach, most governments take in regulating waste management. For example, taxing a household based on the mass of garbage it creates each year, or divvying up remaining space in a local landfill, and then allowing residents to buy and sell it amongst themselves could provide sufficient market incentive for citizens to reduce their consumption of goods and production of waste, without imposing too heavy-handed a system upon them.

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Photo by Flickr user Autan

Over the past century and a half, the United States has all but defined itself through its consumer culture.  The unbridled prosperity of two post-World-War economic booms, and the huge increase in productivity that accompanied the rise of the information age thrust money into the hands of American consumers on a scale the world had never seen. While Americans—even rich Americans—living during the Revolutionary War had almost no concept of disposable income, by the mid 1800s, purchases had already begun their transformation from survival necessities to the complex social signaling mechanism they are today.

There have always been critics of this consumeristic approach to life. Philosophers, among them Karl Marx and Thorstein Velben, were some of the first to take issue with the idea that material purchases could bring happiness. In the United States itself, early dissatisfaction with the consumerist life set the stage for several great religious revivals, and inspired Henry David Thoreau’s excursion into the woods around Walden Pond, as an experiment with a simple lifestyle. 

While successive waves of countercultural thought have turned to Thoreau’s experiences at Walden for inspiration in the 160 years since, perhaps at no time before the present has Thoreau’s maxim of “Simplify, simplify” been so pertinent and culturally relevant. With an economy weekend by the tremendous amount of money spent by Americans on foreign-made goods, and an environment battered by the side-effects of producing and shipping these goods, a reduction in purchases and possessions seems like an all-but-necessary course of action. 

It is onto this stage that the 100 Thing Challenge has strode, gaining momentum with people strung up, struggling with, and stressed out by the myriad of devices, gimmicks and gadgets that complicate their everyday lives. As professional organizer Julie Morganstern says "It's a very emotional process. Often these are things that represent who you once were, but once their purpose is over, they just keep you stagnant." 

But taking a radically reductive approach may have benefits well beyond a simple self-assessing, self-relieving purge; as the saying goes, the greenest product is almost always the one that never gets bought. By reducing both the need for goods to be produced, and the need to heat, cool, and otherwise maintain the space to hold all these goods, limiting the number of possessions you have is an excellent way to increase the sustainability of your day-to-day activities.

Of course, literal adherence to the 100 Things Challenge isn’t a silver-bullet climate solution. What exactly constitutes a “thing” can be notoriously hard to define, and the whole experiment is largely a self-exploratory trend, not a hard-and-fast rule for more environmentally-friendly living. Still, the underlying philosophies of the project could have a very promising impact in the creation of a smarter, less-consumptive way of life.

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Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

As the American suburb skyrocketed in popularity in the years following World War II, it began to have an immediate impact on culture and collective consciousness United States. Open streets, larger land plots, and front-yard driveways thrust a person’s choice of automobile forward, just as the new suburban design made that same car a transportation necessity. Rows of similar and often identical homes fostered an atmosphere of calmness and conformity, and neat hedgerows and picket fences cordoned off properties firmly but politely. And at the centerpiece of each of these newly idealized homes was, always, a green, meticulous lawn.

People in the United States love their lawns—American consumers put down nearly 12 billion dollars in 2003 to maintain that familiar plot of green. And while it might seem a bit indulgent, with water and fertilizer readily and cheaply available, and a potential 20% increase in property value at stake, Americans had good economic reason to spend so freely. Unfortunately and somewhat ironically, though, the most impressively green lawns also tend to be the most extremely bad for the environment.

Aside from the carbon released by deforestation in clearing new lawn property, a precisely-manucured lawn demands constant attention with water that has been collected, purified, and pumped with power provided in large part by coal plants. While plant fertilizers rich in nitrates and phosphates can do wonders by encouraging plant grown on land, they often end up in runoff, where they pollute lakes and streams with fish-killing algal blooms, and a greenish-blue tint.

But the most obvious polluters by far are the lawnmowers, leaf-blowers, edgers, and trimmers. Despite their smaller-sized engines, lawn equipment is loud and notoriously inefficient, often relying on older, dirtier two-stroke engines, which produce not only heat-trapping carbon dioxide, but also a variety of particulate pollutants, and noxious, incompletely combusted hydrocarbons. The damage caused by these small engines is further amplified by the fact that they receive little maintenance or tuning up until their eventual failure, after which disturbing numbers of them end up leeching oils and other toxins into public landfills.

But there are plenty of ways for landowners to green up their green thumb. Eco-friendly fertilizers can be extracted from a variety of common waste products, reducing both energy spent in the creation of commercial fertilizer and the amount of waste that ends up in landfills. Drawing from their experience developing batteries for hybrid vehicles, battery companies like PowerGenix are helping to create a generation of cordless electric garden tools that are quiet, clean, emissions-free and more powerful than their gas-driven cousins, without the toxic threat presented by older battery technologies. 

While there are plenty of other simple, homespun tips for maintaining a lawn that is both green and green friendly, the fact remains that in many parts of the country, low rainfall, cold winters, and sandy soil make the manicured lawn of green Bermuda grass simply unrealistic without a massive, negative impact on the environment as a whole. The best bet for an environmentally conscious lawn is almost always native landscaping—see the EPA’s website on the topic for further information.

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Photo by Jason Coleman

 

Dry cleaners have a reputation as less-than-green businesses: There are plenty of chemicals used in the dry cleaning process and most companies aren’t really energy efficient. But some clothes cleaning operations are working hard to move beyond that image.

Nature’s Best Cleaners is the business at the forefront of the green dry cleaning movement. It’s located in Sunnyvale, California. Peter Xu, who began researching alternatives to the harsh chemicals most dry cleaners rely on after he realized the damage that exposure to those chemicals had done to his hands, owns the company. He found wet cleaning. Wet cleaning technology was developed by appliance manufacture Miele in the early 1990s. It can be used on any garment that is labeled dry clean only, despite what the name seems to imply.

Dry cleaning techniques require perchloroethylene — known as perc — to remove dirt. Perc is known for the damage it can do to the central nervous system. Working with this chemical in a poorly ventilated room will cause dizziness, sleepiness, confusion, headaches, nausea, loss of motor skills, unconsciousness, skin irritation, spontaneous abortions, menstrual problems and death. It can contaminate soil and is extremely difficult to clean up. Dry cleaners usually use a small amount of perc and experience limited effects, but it’s a pretty nasty chemical.

Wet cleaning, on the other hand, uses plant-based detergents which are entirely biodegradable. Water on its own isn’t harmful to clothing, and by varying the pH for specific types of cloth, Xu can successfully clean just about everything that a standard dry cleaner could. Wet cleaning can also reduce the chances of discoloration and damage to cloth fibers that perc is known for.

California state law has mandated dry cleaners to cease use of perc by 2023. As other companies have looked for their own alternatives, companies from Cupertino, San Jose and other parts of California have turned to Nature’s Best Cleaners for advice. In response, Xu has begun offering workshops on the topic. For his efforts, the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute awarded the company $10,000. They’ve also given Nature’s Best an additional grant of $5,000 to offer demonstrations to dry cleaners.

Nature’s Best Cleaners is an amazingly green cleaner. There have been other companies in the past that have made claims of running organic businesses. However, most of those so-called organic cleaners still relied on petroleum products, which Xu refuses to use. Nature’s Best Cleaners has demonstrated a clear path to a greener type of clothes cleaning.

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Green Chemistry: the Magic Potion

Photo by Jeremy Brooks

The average college campus includes thousands of students and hundreds of administrators, staff members and faculty. In some cases college campuses are huge businesses, in others they even qualify as small towns.

Because of that fact, the grassroots sustainability movements on college campuses across the U.S. are increasingly important. The average college campus includes thousands of students and hundreds of administrators, staff members and faculty. In some cases college campuses are huge businesses, in others they even qualify as small towns. The New York Times took note of that fact and covered a growing effort at Oberlin College, in Ohio.

A new house, along the lines of a sorority or other group house, has established itself on that campus: the SEED house, short for Student Experiment in Ecological Design. Members of the house, including junior economics student Lucas Brown, make it clear that the house is a practical experiment. They try hard to live green lives, but in such a way as to study, work and have fun at the same time.

The project grew out of a class project on environmental design that simply snowballed. Somewhere along the way, members of Dr. David Orr’s Spring 2007 class talked Oberlin College’s administrators into handing over the keys to a house on campus. The class made the house energy efficient, convinced the school to spend $40,000 to renovate the house and generally turned the house into a green habitat.

Students moved in last September and have been hammering out the details of living sustainably. They’ve minimized their energy usage wherever they can with tactics like dressing warmly in order to keep the thermostat low and studying in groups in order to turn on fewer lights.

Reading through the lifestyle changes these students have made, you can rapidly see that most of them are fairly minor adjustments. For instance, a few unplugged appliances only translate into remember to plug and unplug items, just as most people would remember to flip a switch on and off. And Brown and his roommates have found a fairly effective manner of implementing some of the harder-to-remember rules: competitiveness. Want to convince college kids to take shorter showers? Make them compare their times to everyone else around them. They’ll set themselves the goal of washing off in less time than it took the last guy — after all, Brown is down to a three-minute shower these days.

College campuses, such as Oberlin, can be an ideal place to implement new ideas (like sustainable housing or environmental management programs), if only because of the speed with which a new idea becomes tradition at a school. If the SEED house can last four years at Oberlin, students will start to see its environmental practices as something they’ve ‘always’ done — after all, it will have been that way since they were freshmen.

And, even better in the average administrator’s eyes, students are the ones doing most of the work in these situations. Internship programs still have a lot to learn from college campuses on just how much free labor and new ideas can be obtained from a student body.

Related articles:
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Photo courtesy of Oberlin College

In an exciting development, the National Housing & Rehabilitation Association (NH&RA) is harnessing the efforts of affordable housing and financing professionals to overcome hurdles in implementing green building principles.

On May 15-16 in Los Angeles, the NH&RA is sponsoring the 2008 Spring Developer Forum, a conference to discuss how to assemble the capital necessary to fund sustainable building design in affordable housing projects.

Affordable housing tax policy and an equity drought resulting from the turbulence in financial markets has complicated paying for the green building features sweeping the nations’ building codes. Because rents are purposely restricted to ensure affordability, financing affordable housing has been accomplished primarily through tax subsidies. Though subsidies compensate developers for the profit difference lost to low fixed rents, they have yet to keep pace with the increased costs of sustainable green building features such as efficient HVAC systems and solar panels.

Thom Amdur, Vice President of NH&RA, explained that the recent credit crunch and sub-prime debacle have left the two main affordable housing financing firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, posting “stupendous losses.” Their profit loss reduces their need for the tax incentives that lead to investment in affordable housing.

Amdur notes that the lack of investment in affordable housing is ironic because that market is quite stable; affordable housing is perpetually in demand. “It’s sad because affordable housing is one of the safest types of investments with the lowest foreclosure rate of any type of real estate investment in the U.S.,” he said. 

Amdur says that the conference will have pragmatic themes. “As a development community, we want to do green and sustainable building, it’s a matter of paying for it," he said. "The conference will focus in part on what types of sustainable building are the most effective, with the biggest payouts. Some sustainable things are easy to do, have immediate impacts and are not particularly expensive, like bike racks or low voc paint. With a smaller budget, we may be able to employ ten other green building strategies for the same cost as solar.”

While enthusiastic about solar, Amdur noted that it can carry with it ongoing costs and long-term payoffs that the affordable housing industry has not yet adapted to underwrite. “We’ll focus on what works, what doesn’t, what challenges and solutions exist, and how to comply with recent legislative changes,” he said.

Issues of class and affordability have long dogged environmentalists, who are commonly accused of elitism. Organizations like NH&RA that work to make sustainable housing accessible to people of all income levels play a critical role in ensuring that "going green" is not a luxury.

Photo by Kristen E. Hall

American Water & Energy Savers, with the help of Power Buyer Green and Grant Capital Management, has established a program to help landlords pay for the cost of remodeling apartment buildings and other multi-family housing to install water conserving fixtures (toilets, etc.). The major problem that many property owners have faced is the significant upfront cost of retrofitting apartments with water-saving devices: there are great savings to be had in the long run but there’s a substantial up-front investment required in order to get there. AWES’ program will allow landlords to borrow against the money they will save in the future by installing these fixtures now.

GEMSA Loan Services (a company specializing in the commercial real estate loan business) owns Power Buyer Green. They don’t have a live site for Power Buyer Green, but my guess is that it will act as the vehicle for making loans to landlords. Grant Capital Management routinely provides services to large-scale property managers -- housing authorities, universities, etc. They also don’t have a live website at the moment (when they do it will be here).

To begin the process of finding financing for a particular project, a property owner would need to contact American Water and Energy Savers, which would then conduct an assessment of the apartment complex (or other multi-family housing). From there, the property owner would receive information about his or her options in the financing program. The general idea is that American Water and Energy Savers can customize a retrofit plan to the particular property with the intention of staying within a budget, maximizing savings and increasing the overall value of a property.

American Water and Energy Savers is based in Florida, and, so far, the organization doesn’t seem to have operated much outside of the state. However, its approach seems very worthwhile. The majority of rental property owners seem to have accepted the fact that they’re going to have to install efficient appliances and fixtures in their properties eventually. The real sticking point is the fact that it will be a significant cost to do so, with no guarantee of quickly earning that money back, made worse by the fact that a large number of landlords require renters to take responsibility for utility payments. A cheaper cost for renters, after all, isn’t immediately passed along to the property owner. But the fact that efficient rental units will be easier to rent in the future makes the investment of both time and money to upgrade systems surprisingly worthwhile.

Photo by Cayusa