Bovine Ambition

I want to be exactly like Alexe P. van Beuren.

Check out her latest column in the Oxford Eagle:

Bovine Ambition

Outside my study window lives the only sign of my agricultural ambitions: a fifteen by twenty plot of raised beds, including a pre-existing boxwood, and forty-one heirloom tomato plants.

Thirty-nine, come to think of it. The blight got two that I ripped out yesterday.

I am twenty-five years old and there are days when I want nothing more than to rise at dawn, don overalls, and pad forth from my sleeping family to go deal with chickens, fruit trees, a vegetable garden, and yes, a cow. A milk cow, to be exact.

Somehow, the whole town knows of my ambitions. Yesterday at the farmers' market, the husband of an acquaintance asked me how my pursuit of cow-dom was going... (Click to read more)

This chick is soooooooo awesome. If she weren't already married I'd be hightailing it down to Mississippi with a ring in one hand and a cow in the other.

Green remodel follow-up

I've been enjoying the bamboo floors for 6 months now, and stumbled upon an article on Slate.com today that had me revisit the decision.

If I'm remembering properly, this is the flooring that we bought.
I have searched and searched but I can't find anything about this company on the internet. Next time I'm at HD, I'm going to look for the company's number on the box... although it's possible i'll have to call HD instead.

I'm still pretty happy with the floors. They're easy to clean and haven't undergone any real damage since I've been using them daily. I wonder, though, about the points cited in the Slate article.
What kind of sealant is on there? what kind of growing practices were used on that bamboo?

In the end, i guess, there's only so much we can do. There are only so many hours in the day. I hope that, like my Prius purchase, my buy will spur others to also buy bamboo products and make them more popular and prevalent. But I can't spend all day, every day researching the minutae of different companies. It feels exhausting.

I'm doing the best I can, I guess, and ultimately I'm happy with those floors b/c they were the best decision I felt I could make.

And they are just so pretty...

Green Remodel phase 1: floors, tiling & lighting

So, we're getting pretty gung-ho about this green remodel!

Admittedly, some of the stuff we have done thus far has not been very green - we did buy standard lumber to finish out the header in the kitchen/living room (to create a bar pass-through from the kitchen to the living room, creating an actual dining area), and we have used standard sheetrock to finish it out. The door we put in to replace the window in one of the bedrooms was just a normal ole door - nothing really special except that it should be MUCH more insulative than that old drafty window that was there.

Still, we're working on some really big projects that ARE green, including flooring, tiling and lighting.

The flooring is what i have been most excited about for the longest time - we have 100% bamboo sitting in boxes ready to be laid. We looked for a long time for a product that was not veneer - I do love the look of bamboo, but what really flips my skirt up is the fact that bamboo is so very sustainable. Yes, taking out the old flooring to put in new isn't exactly 'no impact', but the idea here is to do a remodel, which buyers want, while also being as low-impact as possible. We are planning to 'freecycle' the old floors if possible, so ultimately i hope that someone will get some use out of the old wood floors.

The bathroom tile we're using is standard ceramic tile, which is made out of mud and then baked in ovens. There are tiles that are sun-baked, but they break easily; one of the perks of using ceramic tiling is that, if you get a quality product, it should last for a really long time (scroll down for the meaty part). We were able to buy this at the closest Home Depot, rather than have something specially shipped (I'm going for the least of any evils here while being on a tight budget, so I grudgingly went to HD for the purchase). We will install this ourselves in a few days, over the existing, broken/gross tiles. Sadly, Home Depot does not offer any overtly 'sustainable' tiling (they have this promo going called "Eco Options," so I thought they might, but the store associate we talked to didn't have ANY clue about this. If you're going to shop big-box, you've definitely got to come prepared and know exactly what to ask for. Sure, our tile is made of mud, but what about the grout compound? and what about the manufacturing process?)

We have already had the new lighting installed; we purchased 'Radium' track lighting from ikea - this replaces the old tracklighting, and it's only mildly green. First of all, they're halogen lights, which are the gluttons of the lighting world. However, these halogen bulbs have a lower-wattage than those used in the Home Depot version of the fixture. So, you get the same pretty lights without as much of an energy sink. We will also be reusing an old tracklight set for above the bar area, and reusing some old pendant lights. The rest of the house will be outfitted, where possible, with CFL bulbs (there are already a few).

So, that's it for the biggest projects - next up, I'll talk about the bathroom counters & sinks, dual flow toilets, and re-painting. Also,

If you're still hungry for more info, check out this site... I am finding it incredibly useful!

Irritating news from the auto-industry

I just got wind of an article in Newsweek about Toyota and how their actions speak louder than their words when it comes to being green. (Thanks, NoImpactMan, for the link!)

Basically, Toyota is talking a big game (have you seen their Why Not? ads? - if you go here and click on the Advertising navigation link, you can see the commercial), but they aren't fully committed to lowering mpgs.

Toyota—in contrast to Honda and Nissan—sided with Detroit to try to block legislation currently before Congress to boost fuel economy for all new vehicles to 35mpg by 2020, up from 25mpg today. Toyota, in a familiar Motown refrain, says achieving such a hard target is not technologically feasible

I think that "technologically feasible" here actually means "financially feasible." They can't reach the target number for their quarterly earnings if they have to go so high on mpgs. Yet another reason I wish more companies could go "B" (here's info on B-Corporations from a previous post) - because that bottom line is most likely the reason Toyota is waffling so badly. The Prius isn't enough of a money maker (because of the gas-electric propulsion system), so Toyota is also producing vehicles like the 14 mpg Tundra pickup, which has a profit margin of $10K. The thing is, I probably would have paid $5K more for my Prius! Yes, a big reason I bought it was the mpg factor, but another BIG factor was that I wanted to support green technology! So if more money is required, LET'S DO IT! Argh!

I'm sad that my Prius purchase went to a company that is not full-on behind the green movement. I still love my prius mightily (she's getting about 55 mpg right now), but I'm disappointed that the company I thought I was supporting in their efforts is trying to undermine my efforts (which are so small compared to what they can do).

Man, maybe it's the weather, but my posts are depressing lately. I promise posts that are more optimistic soon!

Economy of Scale vs. Economy of Scope

Now, I am not an economics-savvy person - I never even took Econ 101 as an undergrad (a fact I am sorely regretting, to the point of contemplating buying a textbook or auditing a class).

However, one of the points that was brought up in that Oil and Water Use class way-back-when was the idea of Economies of Scale vs. Economies of Scope. (links are to Wikipedia, which I only found mildly helpful, but a decent intro nonetheless. This article might be useful, too.)

The Scale vs. Scope thing has really been in my head lately in general; it's a big reason why I want to buy local and one of the business-related ideas that preoccupies a lot of my brain cells.

Anyway, the best way I can explain Scale vs. Scope as it matters to me is this:
An economy of scale principle means that the bigger the number of widgets your produce, the lower the cost of producing one individual widget. Because you would already have a widget factory built, you could buy more supplies at once (perhaps allowing you to negotiate the price of those supplies lower), and you could run the factory for longer each day, using a resource you already have to produce more widgets. It's kind of the idea behind buying in bulk as Sam's Club.

However, there are inherent problems when operating on the idea of more-is-cheaper. There's the obvious problem of the gallon of mayo going bad before you can use it all - the price-per-ounce actually goes up but that cost is masked by your initial thought process in the purchase. I'm reminded of the Seinfeld episode "The Rye," where Kramer goes to Costco and feeds the horse Beef-a-Reeno.

Like from the rear of that horse, there's a more insidious problem that emerges. When we try to drive down prices using the Scale concept, we often don't take into account the actual cost. The dollar amount of producing one widget may go down, but there are other tangential costs that don't appear in that lovely little price-per-widget spreadsheet. For instance, what is the impact on the environment of more widgets being produced? Are we also creating more carbon emissions along with those widgets? What is the impact as opposed to the dollar amount?

Now, an Economy of Scale isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I do see the benefits of it on paper not really reflected in real life. In trying to drive that dollar number down by making things bigger, we can end up really displacing that cost into other areas, like worker quality of life or environmental impact.

This is where my take on Economy of Scope comes in. Wikipedia's explanation of it is interesting, but I'm thinking in bigger terms, here. I'm thinking cost as opposed to price. Operating under the Scope idea, we would take into account ways to reduce the cost of things by trying to have an overall positive impact. We wouldn't displace the cost so that our dollar amount looks good on paper but someone else, somewhere else is actually paying the cost.

This is a big reason why I'm making an effort to "go green" or "reduce my carbon footprint" ... however you want to phrase it, I don't want to be pushing the cost of my life off on someone else, just so that the price of my life is low.