How do you decide?

Polish cerealAlmost every sit­u­a­tion where we make a deci­sion involves some compromise.

Break­fast cereal ... I love non-standard less-sweet vari­eties that can’t be found in the Kellogg’s or Post sec­tions of the super­mar­ket. So my search for inter­est­ing cere­als brought me to Big Lots. (I’m a Big Fan of Big Lots.)

I found a trop­i­cal fruits cereal there, from Poland, of all places! Then, I noticed that Big Lots imported it from Poland. There aren’t many trop­i­cal fruits in Poland. So the fruits were grown in Africa, flown to Poland, and then the end prod­uct was flown to some ware­house in Colum­bus, Ohio. Then they were trans­ported to Den­ver. And trucked from the local Big Lots ware­house to my local sub­ur­ban store.

That’s a lot of car­bon footprint.

But how do we avoid that? It’s not easy. Trop­i­cal fruits aren’t grown in Den­ver either. But I like them.

How do you decide which prod­ucts you buy?

Something you can do for Earth Day

Choose to walk

This is a re-post. I thought you might enjoy this lit­tle idea that orig­i­nally appeared on Octo­ber 7, 2011.

You know you need to exer­cise. I know that I do. You know that you need to run lots of errands each week.

Why not com­bine the two?

Rid­ing your bicy­cle or walk­ing to that place will take you more time. But you have to go there any­way! Why drive to the gym and run on a tread­mill when in the same time it would take you to do both, you could save fuel, help the envi­ron­ment and enjoy being outside?

Dis­claimer: I real­ize this only works if you live in a town that’s laid out where you can do your errands close to home.

Local Food and Local Music

The Bell JarI know some peo­ple that are really into local food. And the rea­sons to eat food grown locally are good:

- You’re sav­ing a ton of fos­sil fuels, since the food has not been flown from South Amer­ica or Africa.

- It’s prob­a­bly fresher.

- You’re sup­port­ing local farmers.

Why not apply the same prin­ci­ples to local music? By ask­ing the bands you see to drive all over the coun­try, they are using a lot more fuel than local musi­cians do in bring­ing their art to you.

Obvi­ously, this anal­ogy breaks down.If you restrict your diet to only local food, in many parts of the world, you’ll never taste a mango or a papaya. And with music, if you’re an Amer­i­can, you’ll never hear the rich sounds of many British bands.

I do want you to come out to sup­port your local musi­cians. (The band is The Bell Jar. Local to my town. And good.)

Review: Fisker Karma vs BMW 335d

Fisker Karma carSuper high-performance and green? As you think about your next lux­ury sedan, you may be think­ing about buy­ing a Fisker Karma.

I say that fully kid­ding — I know that none of my read­ers are think­ing about buy­ing a Fisker Karma.

Any­how, I read with inter­est a Car & Dri­ver mag­a­zine review of the new Fisker Karma. Think of it as a much faster Chevro­let Volt with a super beau­ti­ful body.

The gas engine pow­ers a gen­er­a­tor that charges an elec­tric motor that moves the wheels. So it can run only on elec­tric power for about 25 miles.

Why am I com­par­ing the $116,000 Karma to a $44,000 BMW 335d? Here are sev­eral reasons:

1. Per­for­mance? The BMW is faster than the Karma... BMW = 0–60 miles per hour in 5.3 sec­onds. The Fisker does 6.1 seconds.

2. Inte­rior room? Similar.

3. Qual­ity of mate­ri­als, fit and fin­ish? Similar.

4. Fuel econ­omy? BMW wins... 27 miles per gal­lon vs. the Fisker’s 24.

5. Green? Dis­pos­ing of all those lithium-ion bat­ter­ies when they fail to hold a charge any­more will be a night­mare. And diesel is more dirty than gas in some mea­sures but cleaner in others.

BMW 335dThe Fisker is a clear win­ner in the dis­tinc­tive­ness realm. You won’t see another on your block, guar­an­teed — no mat­ter where you live. But for every­thing else, the BMW wins.

A final note: the Porsche Panam­era S Hybrid is def­i­nitely a closer vehi­cle to com­pare. It costs a closer $95,000, does 0–60 in 5.7 sec­onds and gets 25 mpg.

Pho­tos are cour­tesy of the Fisker and BMW websites.

Small choices add up to big differences

Automatic or manual entrance doors?Most Amer­i­cans are faced with a choice when they enter a big retail store... go through the auto­matic doors or the push-open doors?

If you are in a wheel­chair, there’s not much of a choice. But for the rest of us, I’d urge you to choose the man­ual side, because:

1. You will get some addi­tional exer­cise that would not oth­er­wise be part of your life.

2. You will save the energy that it would take to open the doors.

3. You will save the store the cost of the elec­tric­ity it would take to open the doors.

If you make this choice enough times, you will make a dif­fer­ence. If every­one you know makes this choice, we’ll all make a sig­nif­i­cant difference.

One step forward, two back

Mobile charging stationI doubt if you read Autoweek mag­a­zine. That’s why I’m shar­ing this story from the Octo­ber 31, 2011 issue.

AAA now has trucks devoted to charg­ing stranded elec­tric cars in six dif­fer­ent US cities. At the moment, that would only be two vehi­cles — the Nis­san Leaf and the Mis­tubishi i. And there are maybe 25 actual cars float­ing around the US. So it’s a near-future-oriented program.

Any­how, I was amused at the thought of a rel­a­tively low fuel econ­omy truck being dri­ven across town to charge up an “ultra-green” car. It kind of defeats the purpose.

Another strange thing is that the trucks charge up the cars to travel another 3–15 miles ... to “reach a charg­ing sta­tion.” Good luck find­ing a charg­ing sta­tion. You might know that most fully-electric cars take about 24 hours to charge from a reg­u­lar house­hold cir­cuit. (A devoted 240– or 480-volt out­let drops the full charge time down to 3–6 hours.)

My con­struc­tive sug­ges­tion? Use a much cheaper tow truck and tow the car to the owner’s home. Or an office or store that has an elec­tric exten­sion cord.

Elec­tric cars aren’t ready for prime time. Yet.

Label properly

Recycling at IKEAI love IKEA. But they did not get their trash cans right. What are blue recy­clables and what are green recyclables?

If I’m the only one with that ques­tion, no prob­lem. My guess is that oth­ers might be con­fused too. Many cumu­la­tive staff hours must have been spent on explain­ing which kind of objects go into each bin. And many peo­ple prob­a­bly were just con­fused and threw recy­clables into the trash bin.

The very sim­ple solu­tion would be to have dia­grams of types of objects that go into each bin.

No bag please

Most of the time when you go shop­ping in the USA, the per­son behind the counter auto­mat­i­cally puts your pur­chased items in a plas­tic bag. That’s a bad default. Instead, they should pro­vide a bag only if you ask. I’d go so far as to say they should charge you for that bag. Then many would begin bring­ing their own bags.

In 2007, San Fran­cisco was the first Amer­i­can city to ban the use of plas­tic bags. 775,000 gal­lons of oil were used to make the plas­tic bags San Fran­cisco used the year before. (Info from SFGate.com.) Think of what a pos­i­tive impact their leg­is­la­tion has had!

In many parts of Europe, that has been law for an even longer time. And in some Euro­pean stores, you can­not get any­thing to put your shop­ping in. (That can catch an out­sider by surprise.)

The only good thing to be said for plas­tic bags is that they keep plas­tic bag man­u­fac­tur­ers in busi­ness. And pro­vide jobs. How­ever, that’s the same logic as say­ing it’s good to keep mak­ing high-alcohol sug­ary pop drinks that appeal to teenagers — because those com­pa­nies employ many people.

Occa­sion­ally I do get a bag, when I for­get to bring one with me. I’m not try­ing to be legal­is­tic — but I am hop­ing that if you buy and use reusable bags, you will enjoy the pos­i­tive impact you’ll be making.

I give my brother credit for the idea for this post. Thanks Bill!

They wear out

oven-partSo, our oven quit. It came with our house. Heather loves it. We thought about get­ting a new one — because, as you know, repair can often cost as much as much — or more — than buy­ing a new whatever.

In this case, the repair costs $100 to 200 less than buy­ing a “new” refur­bished oven. We loved pre­vent­ing our oven from end­ing up in a land­fill. And Heather got to keep the oven she loves. But ouch! That part cost a mas­sive amount!

Could be better

evil-and-badThe Chinet Cor­po­ra­tion came out with a prod­uct that should never have been released to their ador­ing pub­lic — take­away cups to use in the com­fort of your own kitchen. The idea is, you brew your own cof­fee, mix it with your favorite milk and sugar sub­sti­tutes — and then put it in this dis­pos­able cup with a lid. That way you don’t have to wash a cup. You can just throw it away when you get to your office!

I might sug­gest — buy an insu­lated mug with a han­dle — and wash it. Land­fill con­tri­bu­tion? Zero. Wal­let depre­ci­a­tion? Zero.

And on their home page, they have the bold­ness to say, “Help Pre­serve Nature, Learn More”. Admit­tedly they try to be envi­ron­men­tally aware in some of what they do — but sell­ing such a com­pletely unneeded prod­uct is not respon­si­ble. Shame­ful, even.

Apolo­gies to those of you who wanted a light and fluffy post for your Friday.

Update: See the com­ments. I changed the title in Shane’s honor. He has a good point. (I had titled this post, “Evil and bad” — a bit excessive.)