I came across the Traffic & Marketing Design website today which is marketing and selling “world’s greenest business cards” as one of the products. It uses 100% post consumer paper and is produced in Canada. The ink is vegetable based. I like the idea and I think companies should consider these green business card options. However, I’m not convinced with some of the envirnemental benifits claimed as shown in the table below. The references included there were not useful in convincing me. I agree that no new trees are cut to make these business cards, but the water and energy savings as well as emission and waste reduction need to be further verified. Recycling paper is quite an energy intensive process which requires a lot of water and chemical; further, not all paper is recyclable and I would think that there is still solid waste associated with paper recycling process. Furthermore, the process energy and solid waste would all results in emissions. It would be more realistic and environmentally responsible for such comparison. Just my thought… what do you think?
Have you signed up for CBC’s one million acts of Green? This is a project on CBC with The Hour host George Stroumboulopoulos. Essentially this project is to help us realize that small things we do have big impacts! The website is pretty fancy, i’ll need to spend a little more time to look into it.
As of today, according to the website, there is a total acts of green of 1,641,800 and GHG emissions saved 92,382,927 kg!
Standby power consumption from plugged in electronics, microwave, and other electrical equipment really uses a lot of power! For Canadians, eliminating standby power consumption would save a typical household 450 kilowatt-hours of electricity and $42 a year, or 4 per cent of the home’s total energy use, according to a 2008 report by Navigant Consulting Inc which is summarized in this Globe and Mail article. Pretty cool hey?
Some other interesting fact:
Canadians would cut five of the 6.3 terawatt-hours of standby power per year with more energy efficienct products
6 terawatt-h is enough to power all the homes New Brunswick
this will eliminate two megatonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions
And this is a pretty good movie illustrating how standby power, like a vampire, is sucking blood/money out of us!
Staples are such little things in our life but they are every where. We use them at home, at work, and they are also used extensively in construction. We barely think about them and rarely ever recycle them… They may be small but their (carbon) problem is that the staples are made of zinc coat on steel and therefore has carbon associated with them. According to the American Iron and Steel Institute, 1.14 tonnes of CO2 is emitted per tonne of steel produced. A typical staple for our home/office stapler is around 33mg, and a typical staple for construction staple is probably around 1g (no reference, i should weigh one). Let’s just use home/office stapler as an example and ignore the carbon footprint of the zinc coat on staples. Each staple came with a 36.1mg CO2-equivalent. I probably use a stapler at least once a week. Assume that 70% of the Canadian population uses staplers and we all try to use one less staple each week, then T this is equivalent to 4.444 tonnes of CO2-equivalent saved per year, similar to CO2 emitted if Ione flies for 440 hours or driving 10,000km100,000km in a compact car. That’s pretty significant eh?
I have been looking for an alternative of using staples but current “staple-less” staplers on the market are only good for less than 10pages of document, like these demonstrated on this blog dedicated for stapleless staplers. Another alternative for larger document is to use binders or binder clips. I try to eliminate the use of staplers as much as i can, but I have yet purchased a stapleless stapler so that I have been loosing pages =p. Any other suggestion?
So the earth hour came and went by rather quickly. We live in a condo downtown and when we looked out of the window during earth hour, to be honest, I barely noticed any change…. Just as bright as I remember =).
According to BC Hydro - the province of BC had recorded a 1.1% power consumption reduction. This is unfortunately lower than last year, where 2% power consumption was reduced.
Some facts to share:
Vancouve recorded a power reduction of 1.3%, slightly above average
Pemberton recorded the highest power reduction - 4.6%
New Westminster and Richmond had the lowest power reduction - 0.1% and 0.3% respectively
Amount of energy saved: 72.67MWh, equivalent to powering 2,400 homes for an entire year
What are your thought of earth hour? There are a lot of (valid) criticism of this activity. The truth is this is more of a awareness campaign as supposed to an act of actually saving energy. This is because even though electricity used on the demand side (i.e. after the electricity meter) was decreased, the supply side was unchanged (i.e. before the meter: generation and transmission). To make it easier to understand - basically even if you have participated in earth hour and turned of the light and have reduced the energy consumption by 72.67MWh, the grid still produced just as much electricity. So where did the extra electricity go? You may not want to know but the electricity just got wasted, as there is no current storage facility for the Grid!!
Personally i think it’s a good event - but to make any practical use of it, we need to conserve energy all the time, and not just one hour out of the year!
Small Green Big Deal, shop to sustainability | flo | 
June 2, 2009 12:16 am | 
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