By Shawn Dell Joyce

Americans are the world’s leading consumer of bottled water, downing about 4 billion gallons per year in little plastic bottles. This is roughly equal to one 8-ounce bottle per person per day.

There is much more to the ubiquitous water bottle than meets the lips. It actually takes three to five times more water to make and fill one plastic water bottle than the bottle contains. If you add to that the average energy cost of making the plastic, filling the bottle, transporting it to market and then processing the empty bottle, you begin to see the hidden environmental costs.

“It would be like filling up a quarter of every (water) bottle with oil,” says Peter Gleick, a water policy expert and director at the Oakland, Calif.-based Pacific Institute. Water bottles, like other plastic containers, are made from natural gas and petroleum, which are both nonrenewable resources.

More than 1.5 million tons of plastic are used to produce polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, which is the plastic used in water bottles. The manufacturing processes that produce PET cause serious emissions, affecting both the environment and human health. The Pacific Institute calculates that the process of making the plastic bottles consumed in the U.S. uses approximately 17 million barrels of oil per year, which could fuel 100,000 cars.

Once the plastic bottle is manufactured and filled with water, it has to be transported by diesel truck, ship or airplane. The source of this sometimes-exotic water is often as far away as Fiji or Finland. The Pacific Institute estimates that nearly a quarter of all bottled water sold around the world crosses national borders to reach consumers. For example, in 2004, Nord Water bottled and shipped 1.4 million bottles of Finnish tap water 2,700 miles, from its bottling plant in Helsinki to Saudi Arabia.

Twenty-five percent of bottled water sold domestically is simply reprocessed municipal or tap water, according to a 1999 study by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Both Aquafina, from PepsiCo Inc., and Dasani, from the Coca-Cola Co., are reprocessed from municipal water systems.

The Food and Drug Administration regulates bottled water and reports that about 75 percent of bottled water sold in the U.S.
comes from natural underground sources, which include “rivers, lakes, springs and artesian wells,” while the other 25 percent comes from municipal sources. These “municipal sources” are often the same tap water that flows through your kitchen pipes.

There are actually more regulations governing the quality of our tap water than governing the quality of bottled water in the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency sets water quality standards that are more stringent than the FDA’s standards for bottled water.

Even if the water itself is pure, a plastic container can leach chemicals, such as phthalates and bisphenol A, into the bottled water. A recent study linked breast cancer to these chemicals from plastic water bottles that heated up in the sun or hot cars. Storing the bottles in cool and dark places, such as purses and backpacks, helps reduce the leaching of these chemicals.

Reusing plastic bottles also is discouraged, because bacteria can breed inside them, as they are difficult to clean between uses. On the other hand, glass doesn’t leach chemicals, and sturdy plastic bottles can be washed repeatedly, so consumers don’t have to worry about breeding bacteria. The production of glass uses about the same amount of energy needed to produce plastic bottles, but glass can be used over and over again.

The sustainable solution is to carry your own glass or hard plastic bottle and refill it from your kitchen tap. This is also the cheapest solution, because drinking the recommended eight glasses a day from the tap costs about 49 cents per year, compared with $1,400 from bottled water.

Shawn@zestoforange.com

By Shawn Dell Joyce

Building in this age requires addressing multiple environmental concerns. For the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, which specializes in holistic living,  those concerns mean designing beyond conventional codes and practices. Omega Institute recently unveiled a “living building,” which filters 5 million gallons of waste water each year through an indoor marsh and outdoor wetlands.

This $3 million project was the brainchild of Omega’s CEO, Skip Backus. Backus’ vision was to replace the center’s aging septic system with something more sustainable while providing an educational model for future projects and the 23,000 visitors to Omega each year. The Omega Center for Sustainable Living was conceived.

The OCSL may be the first green building to achieve the LEED Platinum certification and meet the Living Building Challenge, which is the highest standard possible for building performance. This means that the building provides all of its own electricity and heat through geothermal wells and solar photovoltaic panels. The building is constructed of reused materials and locally sourced concrete without additives.

The heart of the building is a 4,500-square-foot greenhouse containing a water filtration system called the Eco Machine. There is a concrete marsh that is 15 feet deep. Water bubbles through a lush flowering jungle containing plants, snails, microbes, algae and fungi that filter out nutrients, contaminants and organic material. But the process doesn’t start there. It actually begins in one of Omega’s 250 toilets or in a shower, sink or kitchen. A tiny spray of microbes helps to jump-start the composting process when the toilet is flushed.

All wastewater from the bathrooms and kitchens flows into an equalization tank, where solid waste is separated from liquid waste.
The equalization tank also helps to quell surges and spread out the flow evenly over the course of the day to keep from overwhelming the Eco Machine. This tank is an anaerobic environment, where microbes reclaim the water without oxygen.

The wastewater then flows horizontally through gravel and the roots of bulrushes, cattails and other plants that pull nitrogen from the water. Next, the water flows through the living building and the aerated lagoons, where it is cleaned in the constructed ecosystem. The water then is polished in a sand filter. Finally, the water is returned to the hydrologic system through a dispersal field. It also is used to irrigate landscaping and flush toilets.

This living sewer system has the capacity to service a small village at a cost far less than conventional pipe and water treatment sewers. Right now, many municipalities are looking at replacing aging sewer systems. The OCSL is a model for large-scale municipal projects. The Eco Machine mimics nature’s way of handling waste. A similar project could serve a single building, neighborhood or gated community. If we designed all our buildings to produce their own energy and heat, reclaim water and process waste, we could reduce our infrastructure costs — and our taxes — greatly. At the same time, we could conserve and reclaim water, which quickly is becoming our most precious natural resource.

Living buildings represent a human commitment to changing our shortsighted and self-serving way of life to be more in harmony with nature and live more sustainably.

Shawn can be reached at Shawn@zestoforange.com

By Shawn Dell Joyce

“Reduce, reuse and recycle” is the new mantra, but we also must add “rethink” and examine our disposable mentality.

The “disposable mentality” of cheap goods and lots of them has dictated American consumerism for the past 20 years. Consumer goods are produced so cheaply that it is often less expensive to buy new things than have broken things fixed. A prime example: computer printers. Many printers cost less than the ink cartridges they contain. This encourages people to buy new printers instead of replacing the ink cartridges.

As a result, we see office equipment, appliances, televisions, outdated VCRs and other consumer goods dotting the curbsides. These perfectly usable consumer goods clog up our landfills and waste our resources. Some countries are stopping this disposable deluge by requiring that consumer products be designed for reuse and disassembly.

In 2001, Japan’s appliance-recycling law took effect. It prohibits the disposing of major appliances, such as televisions, air conditioners and washing machines. Instead, consumers pay fees to recycling firms to disassemble the products. The result has been consumer pressure on manufacturers to build easily recyclable appliances.

The European Union requires manufacturers to pay for recycling electronic equipment and disposing of toxins. That has slowed the rate of planned obsolescence in consumer goods, such as trendy cell phones that seem to need replacing every year. Some manufacturers, including Nokia, are designing their phones to be easily disassembled and reused.

Some American companies are finding that it is cheaper to accept back used consumer goods and recycle them than to buy raw materials. Airline companies, such as Boeing, are finding that it is cheaper to recycle used jets than to mine as much aluminum as they contain.

Remanufacturing is another industrial trend that is beginning to catch hold in the U.S.
Caterpillar, a heavy-equipment manufacturer, accepts back its spent diesel engines and carefully disassembles each one preserving the parts. The engines are rebuilt, with broken and worn parts replaced. That results in new engines and higher profits for the company.

Some new companies and nonprofits are emerging in the reuse of building materials. As lumber, piping and glass become more expensive, it becomes more profitable to reuse parts of buildings than to demolish whole structures, as was common practice. Habitat for Humanity has set up several “ReStores” around the country, where deconstructed building parts are available at low costs.

Want to change the disposable mindset in your household?

—Don’t buy anything unless you really need it. Can you make do without it? If not, can you find it used at a garage sale, through Craigslist or The Freecycle Network or borrow it from a friend?

—Pre-cycle! Purchase items with the least amount of packaging. Buy items that can be recycled, such as Tom’s toothpaste, the only toothpaste tube that can be recycled.

—Guerilla recycle! Take apart the layers of pet food bags, and discard the plastic inner liners. More than a pound of paper can be recycled from one pet food bag!

—Items in packaging that combines paper with metal or plastic — such as juice boxes, milk cartons, paper bags lined with foil, and Bubble Wrap mailers — are all un-recyclable.

—Ask manufacturers to take back products that are spent. For example, most printer ink cartridges can be returned for a discount; why can’t printers be returned, as well?

Shawn can be reached at Shawn@zestoforange.com

By Shawn Dell Joyce
Imagine if beings from outer space knocked on your door looking mighty hungry. You would show them the refrigerator, pantry and cupboards, and they would throw up their handlike appendages in dismay and mutter, “All you have to eat is corn?!”

If that sounds far-fetched, go take a peek at the ingredients labels on your packaged foods and drinks. I bet you’ll find corn, in one of its many forms, near the top of most of the ingredients lists. Corn is one of the main ingredients in more than 4,000 products found in American homes, even toothpaste. Some processed foods, such as Twinkies, contain more than 30 forms of corn.

Americans have become the true “corn people,” more so than the Aztecs and the Incas. If you were to examine a typical American skeleton under an electron microscope, you would find corn isotopes throughout our bones. We have more corn isotopes than any other culture, past, present and perhaps future. Aliens from another planet would think that we worship corn, because most of our modern food system revolves around it.

Americans eat about 1 ton of corn per person, per year. This is not the delicious sweet corn our local farms grow. This is commodity corn, appetizingly called No. 2 corn, and is the main crop grown in our country. We primarily eat corn in the form of animal products.

Cows – ruminants, which naturally eat grasses — are being fed corn unnaturally. Salmon never would eat corn in the wild but are fed corn on salmon farms. Chickens and pigs were designed naturally for varied diets but instead are fed mainly corn. In 2006, 6.1 billion bushels of American corn went to factory farms and feedlots to be turned into protein by animals, according to the Iowa Corn Promotion Board.

About 755 million bushels of corn went to make corn sweeteners, such as corn syrup, citric acid, lactic acid, sorbitol, enzymes, starches and thickeners. Thanks to the versatility of corn, our consumption of processed sweeteners has risen 25 pounds per person since we began mass-producing the stuff in the early 1970s, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. We also are eating almost 20 pounds more corn in the form of meat; 65 pounds more processed grains, such as wheat and corn; and almost 20 pounds more fats and oils per person, per year, according to the USDA.
During this same period, we have seen such food-related illnesses as diabetes, cancers and obesity rise dramatically.

In spite of the surgeon general’s warning of an “epidemic of obesity,” we still are finding new and more fattening ways to consume corn.

Corn is also the most heavily subsidized commodity crop we grow. Under the latest farm bill, mega-corn growers bite off more than a third of farm payments, or about $51.3 billion. It costs Iowa farmers about $2.50 to grow a bushel of corn, yet they can sell the corn for only about $1.45, according to Michael Pollan in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” Our tax dollars are making up the $1 difference per bushel. This encourages farmers to grow even more corn, which further floods the market and pushes the price even lower. When this heavily subsidized cheap corn is exported to countries like Mexico, it undermines their food security because their small farmers cannot compete.

Corn is also one of the most environmentally devastating crops to grow. Corn guzzles fossil fuels in the forms of fertilizer, insecticides and heavy processing machinery. Each calorie of corn produced requires a calorie of fossil fuels to grow using standard farming practices. When that corn is converted into corn syrup, it requires 10 calories of fossil fuels to create one calorie of syrup. When corn is converted into ethanol, we get about four calories of fuel energy for every three of calories of corn, according to the USDA.

The hidden costs of fertilizer runoff into our rivers, creating “dead zones” in our lakes and oceans, and the devastation to wildlife by growing a single crop on so much land make corn extremely expensive to the environment.

Is there any way out of this maize madness? Well, you could plead with the aliens to take you with them or start demanding that our tax dollars fund saner agriculture policies.

In our country, eating is a political act. Every dollar you spend on food is a vote cast. When you pass up processed foods, with all of their hidden corn, and buy fresh, locally grown foods, you are helping to encourage more sustainable agriculture.

Shawn can be reached at Shawn@zestoforange.com

Grapes and the Shawangunks

“Grapes and the Gunks” plein air painting at Phillies Bridge Farm, Gardiner, NY.

By Shawn Dell Joyce

Other cultures have perfected many ways of dealing with the summer’s heat. Here are a few low-tech ways from around the world to keep cool this summer without adding more carbon to the problem of climate change:

South America: Dampen a sheet, and hang it in the window. The water evaporates in the breeze, cooling the room in the process. Another method is to place frozen 2-liter bottles of water in front of fans for instant AC.

India: Yogis practice shitali pranayama, in which they sit cross-legged and breathe deeply. Shape your tongue into a tube like a snorkel, and put the tip outside your mouth. Breathe through your “snorkel” with your chin on your chest. The air moving over your tongue cools you from the inside out.

Egypt: Egyptian nights stay in the 90s. Dampen a bedsheet, and use it as your “blanket.” Evaporation does the trick.

China: Keep bamboo mats between your skin and hot or hard surfaces, such as car seats and chairs. The bamboo allows air to circulate and keeps bare skin from sticking to hot plastic.

Tropics: In humid climates, people often dress down and get wet. Getting wet reduces your core body temperature by 3 degrees and lasts up to an hour. If you wear clothes that can get wet, as well, the cooling effect lasts longer. You don’t have to have a pool. A water hose, faucet or misting bottle will work.

Middle East: You can stay cooler in arid climates by covering up your skin. Picture desert dwellers in their turbans and flowing white garments; the white reflects the sun, and the natural, loose fabrics shade the skin where there is no shade. Bedouins often wear two layers in the heat of the day. Skin exposed to direct sun is hotter than skin insulated by clothing. Turbans and bandanas shade the eyes and soak up sweat from the head, which evaporates and helps cool you off.

Cities: Apartment dwellers in cities often move bedding onto fire escapes to sleep in the cooler night air.
Their rural counterparts can sleep on screened-in porches or outdoors. Another trick is to fill your bathtub with cold water and take periodic dips to keep cool. If you live on the top floor, turn on the ceiling fan (or attic fan) and open the windows to draw out the hot air. If possible, go downstairs to the basement in the heat of the day. Turn off incandescent lights, as they generate 90 percent heat and 10 percent light. Use compact fluorescents or LEDs instead.

West Indies: Spicy foods make you perspire more, which cools the body. Spices also help stop foods from spoiling as quickly and give you an endorphin rush, which feels good in any temperature.

Italy: Train grapevines over window trellises to provide shade in the summer and let in light in the winter. Slightly opening windows on the bottom floor and fully opening upstairs windows maximizes Mediterranean breezes through your villa.

Southern comfort: Front porches are part of the cooling system of a Southern home. Sitting in a lawn chair or rocker that has slats or openings (for airflow) on a shady porch with iced tea is a Southern tradition. You hold the iced tea against your neck to cool the blood going to your brain. Also, hold it on your pulse points on your wrists. Blow into the iced tea and cool air will rush around your face and neck. In temperatures higher than 105 degrees, soak your clothes, and then sit in the lawn chair with iced tea.

Women’s wisdom: Women in hot climates always carry folding fans in their purses. Another secret is to dampen a handkerchief and tuck it into your cleavage. It is very cooling and keeps sweat from running down your chest. Southern women often spritz themselves with rubbing alcohol and then stand in front of fans. Follow that with a sprinkling of baby powder at your pulse points and you’re as cool as a cucumber.

Shawn can be reached at Shawn@zestoforange.com