What's the greenest way to move?

I moved halfway across country this summer from Boston to St Louis, and I used it as an opportunity to take stock of what I own vs. what I need and to find new opportunities to reduce my resource footprint.  Here are some of the things I found out.

Moving is an environmentally taxing ordeal.  Although green products and services are increasingly popular in seemingly every domain, I found environmentally-conscious moving services to be surprisingly rare.  Most of them are concentrated in California, New York, and New England.  In addition, it was hard to get a sense of how to compare different moving options.  How much of my total moving footprint is comprised of how much stuff I have, how I pack it, and how I move it?  As with a lot of green living ideas, there are a lot of tips floating around but very little actual data on whether those tips actually make an impact, how big of an impact, and which ones are the most important.  My sense is that the biggest factors are how much you move and how your stuff is transported, taking as given the distance of your move.

After searching for as much information as I could find, I took a three-pronged approach to my own moving method: 1) giving away as much stuff as possible to people who could use it, 2) buying reusable containers to store my stuff during moving, and 3) using the greenest method possible to move my stuff.

1. I gave away and donated as much stuff as possible to friends and through Craigslist, giving several gallons of used cooking oil to Biodiesel@MIT, donating used eyeglasses to the Lion's Club, and books and DVDs to the Boston Public Library.
2. There are a couple of companies that rent out reusable plastic containers (similar to the ones grocery delivery services use) for moving, but they are localized to Boston and California.  Thus, instead of buying or reusing cardboard boxes, I purchased 21 reusable plastic containers online that now serve as handy storage bins in my new home.
3. I rented a moving container from PODS, which was both very convenient and which I figured might be most efficient given that the company has discretion over how and when to ship the container instead of having one single truck that goes from source to destination.  The other option I considered was renting a spot in a trailer from a company like Broadway Express, an option I would guess is also more efficient than renting an individual truck. 

After exploring green moving and doing the best I could with my own move, I'm left with more questions than answers.

• What's the most fuel-efficient moving method?
• Driving your own moving truck across country
• Hiring movers to drive a truck across country
• Renting space in a large trailer that will be trucked across country
• Using a portable storage container like PODS
• What's the best way to pack your stuff?
• Buying new cardboard boxes made of recycled material (obviously the boxes themselves will be more energy-intensive, but this has the benefit of reducing the risk that your stuff will get damaged, and having uniform boxes helps to pack more stuff into the same amount of space)
• Buying reused cardboard boxes through some of the services below
• Renting reusable plastic containers (only available in select areas)
• Buying reusable plastic containers
• Is it better to sell your furniture and other stuff you will need and buy another set of furniture (used or new) at your destination?  Or is it better to keep all of your stuff and ship it over a long distance?

Here are the resources I found on green moving:

General article on green moving:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/garden/22moving.html

Green moving companies:

• (Directory of green moving companies) http://greenmoversusa.com/
• (Boston) http://www.gentlegiant.com/moving-companies/moving-companies-new-england/moving-companies-boston-ma.aspx
• (New York) http://www.moversnotshakers.com/
• (New York) http://www.serenitymovers.com/

Green moving supplies:

• (Rent reusable plastic moving bins, LA and Orange County only) http://www.rentacrate.com/homes.php
• (Recycled boxes and other moving supplies, based in Austin and San Antonio) http://www.ecobox.com/
• (Rent reusable plastic moving bins, Boston only) http://www.lifetotes.com/

Recycling / reusing old stuff:

• (Boston) Donate books and media to the Boston Public Library:  http://www.bpl.org/general/policies/collectiondev.htm
• (Boston) Donate used cooking oil to Biodiesel@MIT: http://web.mit.edu/biodiesel/
• Recycle your old shoes: http://www.nikereuseashoe.com/
• Donate working electronics, educational supplies, and unopened, unexpired medical and hygiene supplies to MADRE, an international women's human rights organization http://www.madre.org/index.php?s=3&b=9&p=61
• Donated your old eyeglasses and unexpired contacts
• http://www.neweyesfortheneedy.org/index.html
• http://www.lionsclubs.org/EN/our-work/sight-programs/eyeglass-recycling/index.php

Green moving tips

• http://moving.about.com/od/preparingforyourmove/tp/greenmovingtips.htm
• http://environment.about.com/od/reducingwaste/a/move_green.htm
• http://www.movers.com/green-moving/eco-friendly-packing.html
• http://planetgreen.discovery.com/travel-outdoors/eco-friendly-distance-move.html

Carbon challenge update 2

Update 4-21-10

The recycling bins are back!  On my quest to recycle, I've also noticed that Boston University has put up several bins on Commonwealth Avenue, for those jogging on the Boston side near the BU bridge.

Update 3-26-10

Here is a picture I took of the washed-up debris a few days ago.

Also, I've gotten word that DCR is planning to replace the recycling bins in May.  Thanks, Chuck, for forwarding their reply!  Admittedly, I was too lazy to email them myself, but I am thrilled that you did.

From: "Parks, Mass (DCR)"
Date: March 26, 2010 7:35:03 AM PDT
Subject: RE: recycling bins along river
 
Good Morning,

Thank you for contacting DCR. The recycling bins that are along the Charles will be put back in early May.
Bill Hickey

DCR Community Relations 

Original post:
It's almost spring again in Boston.  The weather is beautiful, and now that I've found a job and am on my way toward graduation, I can get back to thinking about the important things in life.  Although I took a break from my carbon challenge for a while, I've again resumed picking up empty bottles for recycling during my jogs along the Charles river.

Here are a few updates on things I've noticed

• There were heavy rains last week which have left a thick layer of recyclables and other debris along the Boston side of the river.  Easy pickings for recycling vigilantes!
• I've saved an estimated 100kg of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by collecting bottles since beginning my carbon challenge almost one year ago.  That's about 2% of the average person on Earth's annual carbon footprint - small but significant, if the calculation is correct.
  
  Regardless of how accurate this back-of-the-envelope number may be, I enjoy the feeling that I'm doing something (however small) to make a positive impact in my own community.  Hundreds of people enjoy the esplanade every day, and I hope that more than a few of us think of its stewardship as our shared responsibility instead someone else's job.
• As has been the case since I started noticing these things, the vast bulk of trash in the bins along the trail consists of beverage containers - soft drink and water bottles, iced and hot coffee cups, and occasional beer and liquor bottles.  I may be in the minority, but I still find it odd to see so many people walking around constantly sipping things.
• The recycling bins have again disappeared along the Esplanade.
  
  I first saw the bins after the food festival sponsored by Whole Foods last summer (around August?).  I remembered seeing them for several months on the Boston side of the river, but starting a couple of months ago, the bins have disappeared.  Help me inquire about getting the recycling bins back by emailing the Department of Conservation and Recreation.
  

The fight for the soul of China

This past week, I made my annual trip to Arkansas to visit my parents, and in my travels I read Out of Mao's Shadow, an incisive and provocative book by Philip Pan that intertwines the history of China since the Cultural Revolution with the stories of a number of individuals who have pushed the limits of authoritarian rule to advocate for human rights and political freedom. The format of Pan's book is akin to that ever-popular genre of indie film (resulting in films that rarely live up to their own self-seriousness), in which seemingly unrelated characters play out individual sagas that eventually intersect to reveal a greater theme.

Last Wednesday, just as I was engrossed in Pan's book, I learned that my uncle Wang Xiaorou had died of a heart attack on a train between Shanghai and my hometown of Changchun. Unlike the subjects of Pan's book, my uncle lived a rather ordinary life largely unscathed by run-ins with the Party, but one just as deeply marked by the vast historical shifts documented in the decades since Mao. And to me, dabo represented the best of China. A high school student at the time of the Cultural Revolution, he was one of the millions of youth who joined the Red Guards, some of whom staged armed conflicts in Changchun and around the country in the mid 1960s. Then, during the rural re-education movement in which my grandparents and other intellectuals were targeted, he joined my father and their entire family for several years of labor in the rural farmlands around Changchun.

I remember as a kid that whenever my parents and other adults would get to talking, the conversation almost always came to the wenhua dageming, but it was not until recently that I had any inkling of what a chaotic and dangerous time my parents lived through. After one of the greatest famines in human history instigated by Mao's Great Leap Forward, along with waves of violence and persecution, China was finally opened up under Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s, and my father and several brothers came to the United States to earn their PhDs and a better life.

But being the oldest of the family, my uncle stayed behind to take care of my grandparents and pursue a career as an electrical engineer. The 1980s and 1990s saw lean times for Changchun, an industrial city in China's rust belt which was hit hard by the dismantling and privitization of state-owned enterprises. Life was uncertain, with massive unemployment and salary stoppages that often lasted several years for those lucky enough to retain their jobs.

But my uncle's sense of optimism was not dampened by the hardships he experienced during these decades of upheaval. With an easy smile and quiet graciousness, he was a man untempted by the quick profits and shady dealings that have enriched so many during the past decade of privatization, relying instead on the the hard work, technical rigor, and unimpeachable personal conduct that I grew up thinking were the hallmarks of the Chinese work ethic. About ten years ago when he was in his early 50s, my uncle helped found the Chaoyang Testing Instruments Corporation, which produces high-precision industrial testing equipment. Riding the economic boom of the 1990s and 2000s, business steadily grew as the company attracted foreign investment, expanded operations, and achieved millions in revenues with my uncle at its helm.

However, I also have no doubt that he understood the compromises necessary for living a normal life in China. My parents often regale me with stories of the pervasive corruption that infests every facet of daily life. "Giving gifts" and trading favors is customary for every transaction from getting your child into high school to receiving medical care. And although I find the majority of ordinary Chinese in my parents' generation to be extraordinary earnest and principled, no one is innocent of feeding the entrenched system of bribery, fraud, and guanxi.

Indeed, most of the subjects of Pan's book also begin as mild-mannered, ordinary Chinese who while struggling under the burden of injustice, initially dare not challenge the status quo. But eventually, the nagging discomfort of living in a system so rife with contradiction, repression, and corruption finally becomes an urgent drive to take a stand against the seemingly insurmountable Communist machine. What makes Pan's work great are his deep insights into the inner forces which drive his subjects and his understanding of the convolutions and internal inconsistencies that have defined both the Chinese Communist Party and the larger society in the last half century

As this great yet mortally flawed nation continues its rapid march onto the world stage, the big question is, who will win the fight for the soul of China? Will it be honest entrepreneurs like my uncle, who are taking advantage of the economic freedom Deng Xiaoping and his successors have fostered, but who know better than to challenge the Party's rule? The idealists, who are driven to action by the corruption and injustice that poison all aspects of society and tyrannize the lives of millions? The thoroughly despicable party cadres and shady businesspeople who continue to fleece the public? Or perhaps worst of all, the fattened little emperors of the younger generations whose moral, physical, and intellectual laziness would put the most jaded American slacker to shame?

The battle is too close to call at the moment, and Pan's ambivalence is palpable in the book's final chapters, which leave murky the ultimate impact of its heroes on the course of China's future. Despite the hopeful theme throughout the book of the power of the individual to affect change in one of the most authoritarian regimes on Earth, the fundamental lesson is that change is anything but inevitable, and much more effort is needed to push forward the craggy boulder of reform. In the end, paraphrasing from Paul Collier's excellent book on international development, perhaps the best we can do is to recognize that even in the most corrupt and oppressive societies, there are still many heroes who fight for justice on pain of grave personal sacrifice. And we must support them as much as possible in their struggles against great odds.

Ode to a blue planet: my love of the ocean

A small handful of occupations seem to captivate the minds of young children - medicine, space, and, of course, marine biology. I was one of the marine biology kids, dreaming of studying the Great Barrier Reef in Australia along with my childhood friend Katie Shapley. I still fondly remember one of my favorite books growing up, a story of a hermit crab called Pagoo who started out as a tiny plankton and survived the many perils of ocean life to a reclusive adult with a handsome shell. As I grew up, I found the exactitude of mathematics, and later the social relevance of economics, more suitable to my intellectual disposition, but I never lost my early fascination with the ocean.

My interest in the sea has been rekindled by a confluence of factors lately. A few years ago, I discovered the Blue Planet, a DVD set produced by beloved naturalist David Attenborough for the BBC. The series contains spectacular footage of ocean life, including vast silvery shoals of sardines, glinting as they’re snapped up by dolphins, killer whales on the hunt, and my favorites, the otherworldy denizens of the abyss.

The proliferation of excellent podcasts on the web has also fed my curiosity. My good friend Ari Daniel Shapiro, who recently graduated from oceanography at MIT, is now an independent radio producer and host of an awesome podcast on ocean-related research called Ocean Gazing, which I’ve been listening to intently. Fascinated by another podcast I heard from ocean luminary Sylvia Earle, I eagerly snapped up the new National Geographic Atlas of the Oceans from the campus library. A massive and unwieldy tome, it contains a wealth of cutting-edge science and eye-popping images of the ocean, and reading it before bed in the last few weeks has brought back memories reading encyclopedias as a kid.

With all the reading I’ve been doing, perhaps the biggest thing that has changed is my view of seafood. Although I’ve been quasi-vegetarian for nearly fifteen years now, a big fraction of that time I’ve felt fine about indulging in the occasional seafood meal. One thing that has always struck me as funny about the vegetarian movement is the inconsistency of the distinction between animal flesh and foods derived from animals, namely milk and eggs. Although most vegetarians consider seafood verboten, eggs and dairy are staples of the standard (ovo-lacto-)vegetarian diet as most people understand it. But why the distinction? It doesn’t seem obvious that chickens and dairy cows suffer any less than fish or shellfish caught by fishing lines. Furthermore, the negative impact of large-scale farming on the environment has been well-documented. In fact, many farm animals living in industrial farms seem to suffer more cruelty and contribute even more to environmental degradation than wild seafood. I don't know whether seafood or dairy exacts a hire price on animals or the environment, but I think that consciencious omnivores should push for greater understanding of the true impacts of our food instead of sticking with traditional categories.

In any case, although I have largely avoided milk and egg products, until recently I’ve been more accepting of eating seafood because of my perception that that fish suffered less pain than livestock and that livestock practices were particularly cruel and polluting. But that view has gradually changed over the years. First of all, the characterization of sea life as cold and unfeeling is clearly incorrect, especially for two particular species I used to enjoy: squid and octopus. Although much is still unknown about the intellectual capacities of these mollusks, what is clear is that they are far from the mindless blobs that we typically think of invertebrates as. Scientists estimate that octopuses might be more intelligent than dogs, and recent reports of octopuses who escape from their cages and taunt their caretakers hint at a mischievous intellect beneath those alien-looking eyes. When I think about a dish of squid or octopus, I no longer imagine the briny sweetness and delicate texture of their flesh, but picture sensitive, intelligent creatures jetting about in the twilight depths, whose mysteries we have barely begun to fathom.

The second reason I’m much more hesitant about purchasing seafood is that fishing is vastly under-regulated, with destructive and inhumane practices still rampant (see this damning report by the Economist). The seas still represent the most devastating tragedy of the commons on the planet, and it breaks my heart to learn of how little respect for life is reflected in our fishing practices. Trawlers bulldoze whole ecosystems before they are even described by science. Many common food fishes can live for decades – orange roughy up to a century or more, and as this Nature paper documents, stocks of large predatory fish have already declined 90% relative to pre-industrial levels. We have but the faintest idea of what kind of awareness and memories that these fish have, yet we thoughtlessly plunder them – along with thousands of tons of “bycatch”, which are dumped back dead into the ocean or used for low-grade fish meal or fertilizer. In general, I try not to be a bleeding heart when it comes to animal rights, but something about our callousness toward sea creatures truly stokes my ire. Perhaps humans, after all, are the most cold-blooded creatures to roam the sea.

Ranting aside, sustainable fishing does exist, but it’s incredibly hard to find trustworthy indicators of such practices when making purchases. The Monterey Bay Aquarium produces an excellent guide to sustainable seafood, but even as a knowledgeable consumer who has spent quite a bit of time doing research and examining labels, I find it nearly impossible to find seafood I can feel good about purchasing. Although I’ve been encouraged by the trend toward consumer awareness of food systems and practices, it seems that labeling and regulation of seafood has fallen far behind that of landfood, and the clean image of seafood among conscientious consumers seems to make it a particularly worrisome blind spot.

References:

The Blue Planet

http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Planet-Seas-Life-Special/dp/B001957A4E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1243285643&sr=8-1

Economist survey of the oceans
http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12798458

The National Geographic Atlas of the Ocean
http://www.amazon.com/Ocean-Illustrated-Atlas-National-Geographic/dp/1426203195/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243289434&sr=8-1

“Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities”, Ransom A. Myers and Boris Worm, Nature, May 15th 2003
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v423/n6937/full/nature01610.html

“Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services”, Boris Worm and others, Science, November 3rd 2006
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/314/5800/787

Ari Daniel Shapiro
http://aridanielshapiro.wordpress.com/

Pagoo
http://www.amazon.com/Pagoo-Holling-C/dp/0395539641

Interview with Sylvia Earle on On Point
http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/02/sylvia-earles-life-aquatic

Carbon Challenge update

I haven't been picking up bottles lately, both because I've been busy with work, and also because the water levels have been up and nearly all of the bottles on the shore have been washed away. But the tally's at 50kg saved from recycling so far, and running.

In any case, here are a few things I've noticed:

• There are a lot of little baggies around the trail and sidewalk with brown doo inside.
  
  If you're going to take the effort to put it in a bag, why not go all the way? Boo to pet owners! I've always been deeply ambivalent toward pet ownership. But that's a story for another day.
  
• It's abundantly clear that nearly all the trash thrown out by pedestrians consists of drink containers - coffee cups and soft drink bottles. Although I think that the recent backlash against bottled water is a little bit reactionary, one observation in particular sticks in my mind:
  
  What would the world be like if every person on Earth insisted that all of the fluid they drank had to come from a bottle?
  
  So many of us are moving toward this extreme that bottled water is not just a fashion or a pet cause anymore.
  
• I read this excellent recent piece in the Economist recently about waste and the environment. And even if I'm not saving energy by recycling, it made me feel better about disposing of the bottles and cans rather than letting them wash into the ocean.
  
• There need to be more trash bins and (at least some) recycle bins on the Charles river trail, especially on the Cambridge side.
  
  Who's in charge of this? The Memorial Drive area seems to fall within the purview of several jurisdictions: MIT, the State of Massachusetts, and the Department of Conservation and Recreation. But my sense is that the latter exercises practical oversight (not least because DCR was the organization that had my car towed several times!). So send them an email to see what they can do about putting more trash bins and recycle bins on the trail.
  
• I've always wondered why it was impossible to actually redeem deposits in the city of Boston.
  
  Now I can recycle on campus (although not in my dorm!). But the first year I lived in downtown Boston I spent literally months seeking out every grocery store in town trying to find a place I could get my deposits back, or at least recycle the bottles I had. The Shaw's in Back Bay does take deposit redemptions, but at some absurdly low daily cap of 100 bottles or something like that. It must be some kind of scheme to get around mandatory deposit laws.

Update on my aviation carbon challenge

Thanks to Jessica, Jason, and Chuck for taking my aviation carbon challenge, saving a whopping 14.4 metric tons of CO2 (I used the Atmosfair calculator to get these totals)! Check out the sidebar on this blog for a running total of the savings from this carbon challenge. Obviously, I can't take complete credit for these commitments for conservation, but I'd love to have more excuses to give away copies of my favorite David Attenborough documentaries. So I'm looking for more challenge-takers.

On a related note, I watched this excellent lecture by Sloan professor Rebecca Henderson the other day. The theme was how to get organizations to accomplish positive change for sustainability. But several of the lessons apply equally well to our personal lives:

• Don't perpetuate negative values
  
  We can all point to forces beyond our control (e.g. our car-centric cities, the geographic disperson of our families and friends) which cause us to adopt resource-intensive lifestyles. But most of us have more discretion than we think to make changes and to reduce our own roles in perpetuating these environmentally costly social norms. All social change begins with an individual, an individual who at some point realized that she had the power to make a change in her own life.
  
  
• The only way to make change is to get started
  
  You can't learn to golf like Tiger Woods by watching videos, and we can't make the world more sustainable by watching An Inconvenient Truth. We have to get down to it. Rebecca talks about two paths toward change: revolutionary and incremental. The first way involves completely overhauling the way we do things, and starting over from scratch. The second way involves tackling the low-hanging fruit (e.g. long-distance travel, for many of us) and building on incremental success. Both paths can work, but both involve getting our sneakers dirty and truly Walking the Talk.
  

Update on my Walk the Talk Challenge

I've now added a widget to the left sidebar of this site that will track my CO2 savings from recycling bottles.

And for those of you who would like to join me in greening while jogging, I've noticed that the best picking grounds for bottles on the river trail are on the Boston side of the river between the bridge and the boathouse area. The currents seem to deposit the most bottles there.

Walking the talk: environmentalism gets personal

For several years now, I've been involved in the student environmental movement at MIT, one of whose main themes is Walking the Talk - being the change we want to see in the world. And it hasn't escaped my notice that while we earnestly endeavor to create a more sustainable campus and society, we as individuals continue to behave in ways which are intensely costly to our environment. Despite our genuinely good intentions, as affluent Americans our status quo of convenient travel and ubiquitous disposability is the most resource-intensive lifestyle on Earth (worse, I might point out, than many of our red-state counterparts. If rampant divorce is the evangelical moralist's bugbear, air travel is the environmentalist's).

Decadent though it is, this is our normal, and to resist it all seems tantamount to rejecting membership in normal society. But the more I work on Walk the Talk on campus, the more untenable becomes the gap between what I preach and what I do. So not long ago, I decided that as an academic in the most rarefied, tweed-patched corner of America, I feel safe enough to step off the beaten path and try to walk the talk in earnest. Here's one of many ways I've found to take matters into my own hands.

Almost every day, I jog along the scenic trail that runs on both sides of the Charles river between the Science Museum and the Harvard Bridge, taking a break from my research and listening to my favorite podcasts. Casually at first, I started noticing how many full or partially-full beverage bottles get tossed out onto the grass and sidewalk. I mused at our exorbitance in not only purchasing so many bottled drinks, but tossing their contents before they even pass our lips. And at first, I saw these bottles as just another holdover of a lifestyle that must soon vanish in the face of climate change, just one of innumerable environmental misdeeds that I'm no longer surprised by.

But one day, I picked one of the bottles up off of the ground. It was a sealed, unopened bottle of Poland Spring water, in the new "Eco-Shape" container. I carried it home, washed it, and put it in my department's communal kitchen where someone happily took it. In time, I found another unopened bottle and also gave it away. And a few weeks ago, it finally occurred to me that I could also do something about all of the empty bottles lying around. Whereas for so many hundreds of jogs, the bottles on the ground were just a part of the landscape that I barely noticed and felt no connection to, I realized that even though I didn't litter them, I was still a party to their presence in the environment.

Today: water bottles set out for participants in a benefit walk


So I started bringing some of the plastic bags I've been stowing (don't we all have a hidden stash?) along on my jogs. I don't pick up every single bottle I see, but just the ones that are easy to reach when I'm almost back to campus where they can be recycled. Even so, it's amazing how quickly my bags fill up. It takes barely 5 minutes out of a jog to pick up a bagful of bottles - far less than the time it takes to browbeat a colleague about drinking bottled water - and it's surprisingly easy to run with a bag on my arm.

I can fit more than 20 containers into a single bag - up to 50 if I find enough conveniently-squashed aluminum cans. If I pick up bottles twice a week, that's 2000 bottles a year, amounting to about 489kgs of CO2 saved by recycling (assuming this consists entirely PET plastic, see calculation below. Incidentally, recycling aluminum saves nearly twice as much energy). It's not much, but the more important impact of this small step is the way it's changed my perspective. I'm often more concerned with conceptual issues than local ones, and I tightly optimize my life to make the most out of every day. For the most part, that means trying to get as much research done as possible. But now, jogging isn't just about me. It's not just a way for me to think of new research ideas or to relieve the stress of grad school. Now, it's my own small way of taking responsibility for my local environment and community, and hopefully it's a step toward a lifestyle that truly reflects my values.

Picking up bottles has also made me think, and ask. During the rather dry winter this year when the riverbank was low, huge piles of bottles washed up on the Boston side of the river, right next to the dirt trail carved out by joggers. How did all of these bottles end up in the river? Are they mostly thrown in from passing cars and careless pedestrians? Or is this the confluence of all of the bottles and cans from the streets of the City, washed down storm drains and headed toward Boston Harbor and into the open ocean? Where do they end up and how do they impact the chemistry and ecosystem of the oceans?

My bottle-picking habit has also stoked a penchant for covert citizen journalism. Just a few days ago I came upon a promotional team from City Sports who were giving away free bottles of drinks to joggers on the trail next to Memorial Drive. Expecting to see bottles strewn about the area the next day, I took some pictures with my cell phone. Fortunately, the salespeople didn't leave any trash behind, but now, I've got my eye on them. Tomorrow, I'm going to check out whether the walk-a-thoners I encountered today left any debris behind.

My Walk the Talk Challenge

Working in the environmental movement, one quickly realizes that the most powerful way to help the planet is to engage other people. Even if I reduce my own carbon footprint to zero (which would be nearly impossible), that's only 20 tons per year of CO2 out of global emissions of 30 billion tons. In contrast, accomplishing a 20 ton reduction by encouraging small changes in a large number of people is eminently achievable, and can even be an enjoyable experience for everyone involved.

Thus, to all my friends, I'm issuing my own Walk the Talk Challenge to you. For most of us, air travel represents the single biggest source of carbon emissions which contribute to global climate change. Every passenger-mile on an airplane accounts for .4 to .6 lbs of CO2, meaning that a single intercontinental flight can amount to thousands of pounds of emissions (compared to an average 6 tons per year for the average person on Earth).

My challenge to you is to forgo one intercontinental flight this year that you would have otherwise taken, and write about it in the comments section of this post. At the end of the year, I'll see how many people have taken on this challenge and compute our total CO2 reduction, which I bet will add up to a tidy sum. As an added bonus, I will give as a gift to every person who takes on this challenge a DVD from David Attenborough's "Life" series. The documentary series decades in the making explores life on Earth in dazzling detail and represents irrefutable proof of why our environment is so worthy of saving.

Calculation

From David MacKay's excellent electronic book Sustainability Without the Hot Air, I estimated that one plastic bottle takes 0.7kWh of energy to produce. From the NRDC, recycling one PET plastic bottle saves about 57% of the energy it takes to produce it, or about .4kWh. One kWh of electricity produces about 613 grams of CO2, so the result of this calculation is that recycling one plastic bottle saves about .24kg of CO2 emissions. Quite a large amount, if you ask me!

References

Bottled water has become a major battleground in environmentalism, and there are a wealth of resource to learn more about how bottled beverages are made, their environmental impact, and the their energy content.

• The latest research on the energy implications of bottled water:
  P H Gleick and H S Cooley. 2009
• A recent article from Sciencenow about the latest research in the energy content of bottled water
• Jeffrey Morris, "Recycling vs. Incineration: An Energy Conservation Analysis," Journal of Hazardous Materials 47 (1996), pp 277-293.
• Sustainability Without the Hot Air - David MacKay