It Isn’t Easy Being Green

What does ‘green’ mean, when you’re looking for products to build or remodel your house?

Sounds like a straightforward question.

The answer, unfortunately, is, “it depends.”

Does ‘green’ mean that a product is made from recycled materials? Or is it something that uses minimal non-renewable resources in its creation? Does it mean that the product is non-toxic? Are ‘green’ items only those that come entirely from post-consumer waste?

Is that low VOC paint you’re buying really healthy? Or has the manufacturer played a shell game and eliminated the chemicals that are defined by law as VOCs, and substituted in equally toxic chemicals that aren’t tracked – yet.

Are your recycled shingles really helping the environment by reusing a product that would otherwise go into a landfill? Or is the manufacturer adding a chemical that will run off the roof with the rainwater and cause endocrine disruption in fish and put ‘gender bending’ chemicals into our drinking water so that our children grow up infertile?

Straightforward? Nope.

Andy Pace, the owner of Safe Building Solutions, has spent a considerable amount of thought, time and effort creating a new system that homeowners, remodellers, businesses, building contractors and the construction industry can use to help determine how ‘green’ products are that you use in construction or remodeling.

It’s called the “Degree of Green” (TM) Rating System, and it gives products three separate scores, one each for healthfulness, sustainability, and environmental impact. The system also tells you of any disadvantages a product has, looking at such things as a product’s availability, its price and the degree of technical expertise necessary to use it.

I’ve known Andy for many years. He is himself a distributor for several high quality lines of low-toxicity and environmentally safe products used in all kinds of building and remodelling. Andy doesn’t have any blinders on, however, when it comes to the strengths and limitations of the product lines he carries. He’ll tell you about the good, the bad and the ugly for each one of his products – and can give you an honest low-down on his competitors’ products as well. You won’t find a more honest or helpful businessman in the industry.

Go take a look at how the rating system works, and who it’s relying on for expertise. You can even see sample rating sheets to show you how it works.

It’s a terrific resource that we’ve needed for a long time, and my hat is off to Andy for coming up with it!

Degree of Green (TM) Rating System logo and image copyright (c) 2007, Safe Building Solutions, Waukesha, WI. All rights reserved. Used here by permission. Please do not reproduce or copy without the express permission of Safe Building Solutions.

Manure Happens!

Those of you who have meandered through our websites know that we are strong advocates of organic farming. It’s not because we are granola crunching tree-hugging Mother Earth sandal shufflers, as organic farming supporters are often portrayed by the main stream media. Actually, we don’t fall into either of the major political ‘extremes.’ We’re Wisconsinites (aka Cheeseheads), and as the UW-Madison band always sings in the fifth quarter of every home football game: “When you’ve said Wiiiis-con-sin… you’ve said it all.”

Translated: in America’s Dairyland, we tend to be fiscally conservative, socially progressive, and as ‘pegs’ unlikely to fit into anyone’s square or round holes.

Michael and I support organic farming for a variety of reasons, but we most adamantly also understand that conventional farmers are neither evil, misguided or idiots, as the alternative press is wont to describe the ‘conventional’ sector of farming.

One of the thorny problems constantly facing conventional dairy farmers is manure disposal. As a back-of-the-envelope type calculation, a conventionally fed dairy cow produces about 120 pounds of manure every day. Organic dairy farmers have dairy herds that are small enough that they can usually compost and recycle all the manure that their cows produce and use it to fertilize their acreage. Modern conventional dairy farms, however, have herds which can number in the thousands of animals in a relatively small area.

At 120 pounds of manure a day per cow, that’s a whole heap of manure.

Every day.

Other farm animals – pigs, chickens, ducks, horses, sheep, beef cattle, goats and all the other livestock you’d care to think of – also produce manure.

Lots of manure.

So, why is that of any interest?

Organic farmers aren’t the only farmers interested in preserving the land and the environment. Conventional farmers are equally passionate about the land, and I have yet to meet a farmer of either type that doesn’t want to pass along to the next generation a healthy legacy. No one wants to poison their land or water with dangerous runoff from manure.

And here’s where an important “aHA!” has bloomed within conventional farming that is as “organic” and “green” as green can be: manure is biomass.

With technology that individual farms can and are implementing across the nation, farmers are turning the manure into an important source of renewable energy.

The equation is fairly straightforward: Manure + bacteria inside a biomass ‘digester’ = methane, methane that can be directly converted into electricity. The byproduct left after the digester has done its magic is a fibrous material which is clean, dry, odor-free and can be recycled into animal bedding. Once it is soiled, back it goes into the biomass digester, in an ongoing renewable cycle. As an additional benefit, capturing methane from manure in this fashion eliminates its contribution to greenhouse gases.

How successful are these biomass digesters?

Very. And improving by leaps and bounds as we better understand how to make this technology work. They are also becoming affordable, to the point where individual farming operations can not only afford to own one but can also view it as a potential ‘cash cow,’ so to speak. Farmers can produce enough energy from manure to not only meet the electricity needs of their individual farm, but can also provide electricity back into the power grid.

The farmer makes money, the environment benefits, the community at large reduces its dependence on non-renewal fuels… now that sounds like a winner to me!

Brighten Up An Injured Teen’s Day

Tiffany, a 17-year-old senior from a small Wisconsin town, was struck by a drunk driver earlier this spring when she was out walking with a friend. She’s a fighter, and even managed to graduate with her class last week despite horrific injuries that left her at first only able to communicate by blinking.

She’s now at a special hospital in Colorado, working hard to gain enough function that she can talk, use a sip-and-puff system and perhaps even breath on her own without a ventilator.

If you have a moment, take the time to visit Tiffany Pohl’s blog today, and leave her a message wishing her the best. Her family reads her the messages every day, and says they really brighten up Tiff’s day! You’ll have to register your email address before leaving a message (it’s a protected blog on CaringBridge.org), but that just takes a minute and you won’t get spammed or bothered by doing so.

A Picture Paints a Thousand Words

I’m not one for hyping products, but with Mother’s Day sneaking up, I can heartily recommend as a gift something my brother and I gave our Mom a while back.

It’s called a “CEIVA Digital Photo Frame” and there isn’t anything else out there like it.

Basic idea: a CEIVA lets you share digital photos from anywhere in the world with a family member who isn’t Internet connected or isn’t even computer literate.

How great is that?

It’s easy to set up and use.

1. Buy a CEIVA (you have a few options as to the size of the flat panel display you want – but all are under $200), and buy a “Picture Plan” (about $100/year). You can buy them locally at places like Sam’s Club, order one through Amazon.com, or buy a frame directly from CEIVA at http://www.ceiva.com.
2. Designate an internet-connected family member to administer the CEIVA account. Administering the account is a piece of cake – it takes five minutes to set everything up on the Internet side.
3. Plug the CEIVA Digital Photo Frame into the recipient’s existing phone line.
4. Tell family members who are Internet connected how to upload photos to the CEIVA account (it’s as easy as sending an email). You can also upload photos from your camera phone.
5. Let the CEIVA receiver do its thing.

Each night (you can set the time for when it does this), the CEIVA silently dials a local number to pick up new photos sent to the frame. And then, starting in the morning, the CEIVA displays the photos in a continuous full-color slide show.

My Mom now starts every morning by watching new photos that have come in from all over the world to her CEIVA, sent by her children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews. It lets her share in all our lives, very close to real time, even though she lives far away from many of us and isn’t herself part of the ‘digital revolution.’

She loves it to bits.

Hands down, I think it’s one of the neatest gifts you can give.

They Eat Horses, Don’t They?

Yesterday, one of my friends sent me Joel Stein’s trolling commentary from this week’s Time magazine, where he advocates eating horse meat. Mr. Stein says,

I decided not to let a bunch of horse freaks… prevent me from eating meat enjoyed in Japan, Belgium, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.

Let’s see, we have eight countries in the world that eat horse meat, so therefore the rest of us that don’t condone eating the likes of Barbaro are “horse freaks?”

Huh. Guess this is one of those times where you can count me in with the “freaks.”

Mr. Stein then went on to say,

It’s not that I don’t think killing horses is cruel. It’s just that I think killing chickens, pigs, sheep and cows is equally bad. Morality based on aesthetics is pretty shallow.

Do you now? Personally, I find journalism based on opinion yet presented as fact not only shallow, but contemptuous.

Here’s just one fact – among many – not based on the “aesthetics” Mr. Stein sneered at. Slaughtering horses isn’t the same as killing animals bred and raised for human consumption. The American Humane Society (hardly a radical group of “horse freaks”), points out that

horses are different from cattle (and other animals specifically bred, sold, and transported for human consumption) due to their instinctive flight response in stressful conditions, making it difficult to accurately stun them prior to slaughter. Undercover footage has demonstrated that many horses are dismembered while fully conscious, underscoring the need to ban this utterly inhumane process.

Ah, but Mr. Stein believes that objections to horse slaughter equates us to being “a nation that thinks like a 14-year-old girl.”

Oh, puh-leeze.

Even if I could agree with Mr. Stein’s position (which will happen when pigs sprout wings and fly), I somehow can’t find it in me to respect someone who brags in print about lying on their customs forms so they can illegally import such a “delicacy” as horse meat.

Cultural taboos and humane considerations aside, if Mr. Stein wants to chow down on an animal that has been pumped full of pesticides and insecticidal wormers, injected with antibiotics that aren’t approved for meat animals, or given pharmaceuticals like Lasix, and doused daily with fly spray – all standard practice and allowed under current regulations, as a horse isn’t a meat animal for human consumption in the USA – then, hey, he should go for it. He richly deserves precisely what he’s injesting.

But first, Mr. Stein, move to Japan, Belgium, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany or Austria. This is the United States. We don’t eat horses here.

Bon appetite.