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