Columnists

Earth Hour is one of the most fun events of the year, in my books anyway. Everyone’s itching to get out of the house in spring, and what’s more fun than to walk through the streets of your town when everyone’s out to see the spectacle. While a light bulb that makes light out of dark can seem like a miracle thing, somehow, to me, seeing a whole bunch of lights go out at once, in the spirit of environmentalism, is the big miracle.

Earth Hour is next Saturday, March 27 at 8:30 PM. My parents are coming to town, and I’m looking forward to walking the city with them as everyone comes together to create a big non-light show across the Toronto. It’s great to see all kinds of light sources flicked off — in office towers, apartments, shop signs and window displays, in public spaces, schools, little houses and more. An LED flashlight (powered by rechargeable batteries) is the evening’s must-have accessory!

After the event, I’ll be eager to see how much we reduced our power consumption. The dramatic numbers of previous years show that we’re willing to conserve, all we need is a little incentive… or a special event. Here’s my post about last year’s results.

What are you planning to do for Earth Hour?

Canadian figure skating champion Josée Chouinard has a mission to for kids: green your school! Canada’s Greenest School Contest, an initiative of IC Bus, is a fabulous opportunity for the winning student’s (or classroom’s) school to win a hybrid school bus (value: $200,000; fuel efficiency improvement over a conventional bus: 65 per cent), a LEED building audit to evaluate the school, $3,000 for the student who entered the contest (or to be shared among the class) and $500 in classroom supplies for the winning student’s teacher.

Why is Chouinard involved? “When I grew up, we were not really concerned about the environment and being careful of the earth and making sure that we were giving a future for the next generation,” says Chouinard. That’s changed, however: “Nowadays, the awareness is there. We’re making sure that things aren’t going to waste and we’re preserving the environment. Especially now that I have children, I think the best way to educate them is through school – [my children] started school in September.”

I asked Chouinard if she felt that the Vancouver 2010 Olympics brought across a sense of eco awareness that would help kids embrace the Canada’s Greenest Schools Contest. “When you have such a big event like the Olympics promoting environmentalism, I think the best way to then reach out and train and educate the new generation is through schools,” she said. “Every aspect of the Olympics was about being green.”

Why does this contest matter to the big picture? According to IC Bus, one school bus has the capacity to take 36 passenger cars off the road, and thanks to the kids who are riding busses (instead of being dropped off by car) 1.3 billion litres of gas are saved in Canada every year. I’m sure those number will be even more impressive as more schools use hybrid busses!

So how can students win the contest? Kids all the way from Kindergarten to Grade 12 can enter a photo collection, a piece of music, a video, an essay, or photos of a diorama, collage or piece of artwork. Whatever form the message takes, it has to say how the student or class would like to make their school a more green, eco-friendly place. Entries are due April 5, so click here to find out how to enter!

OK, if you’re squeamish don’t read this.

A couple of weeks ago I saw my dermatologist, and I had a mole removed. I wasn’t expecting to have it done, I just mentioned that the mole was in the way of my bra strap. My doctor offered to remove the mole right there and then. As a lay on a bench in the surgical area, green paper surrounding the offending mole, I was a little unsure of what I’d got myself into.

That feeling didn’t subside as the surgical assistant (nurse?) peeled the plastic top off of a box containing a shiny new set of specialized surgical scissors. (Panic: They were going to cut off my mole with scissors!) I tried to breathe deep so the doctor wouldn’t know I was nervous.

The micro (mini?) surgery was over in less than a minute, the only thing piquing my adrenaline was the needle of local anesthetic. A couple of weeks later, the only mark left is a pink spot that is slowly fading away. But somewhere in that time where I was lying on that bench, I had a look at all the medical gear that seemed to be single use: needles, vials, swabs, scissors and other gear my adrenaline-mired, fight-or-flight mind couldn’t identify. Thinking of those single-use scissors, made of stainless steel or some other metal fit for making a precise instrument, it struck me that although our health is incredibly important, medical waste must be taking a huge toll on the earth, not just in the landfill but in the resources required to make all that gear.

This morning on CBC.ca I noticed that hospitals are trying to find ways to reuse some equipment, after careful sterilization and so forth, of course.

Certainly there are legitimate concerns about reusing medical equipment. I worked with Homemakers magazine writer Paul Benedetti on this story about Canada’s war superbugs, and the impact resistant bacteria can have on a person’s life.

What do you think, could hospitals find ways to be lighter on the earth?

I was over a some friends’ new loft the other day, admiring their new computer. Apparently the monitor, or “display” as people seem to be calling them, is made from solid aluminum, milled to shape. As my friends were talking about this, I was holding a can of pop in my hand. “Wouldn’t it be great,” I said, “If that monitor were made from recycled pop cans?”

This may seem like a big stretch. Like, Jess, you’re getting pretty flaky here – no way could companies use material from the garbage heap to make new things. But my thing is, it’s just got to be easier to reclaim material from our blue bins than it is to mine it. Even if we contaminate the material by mixing it with other stuff, surely it’s easier to purify that aluminum, or glass, or steel, or titanium, than mine it?!

I think computer companies are starting to see that not only are we creating an embarrassing amount of electronic waste these days, there’s valuable material in obsolete computers, monitors, cables, phones and other parts.

A year or so ago I had a chance to meet with the Director of the Office of Sustainability and Stewardship for Motorola USA, Bill Olson. In telling me about the Motorola Renew for a story in Homemakers, a phone made from recovered water bottles (the big ones used in office water coolers), Olson said that the key to using recycled material in new manufacturing is to find a really clean waste stream. Those big water bottles are ideal because there’s a collection system for them, and they’re all pretty much the same.

I’d love to see other manufacturers choose one item from the waste stream, something that would work well as part of their products. Companies could claim first rights to premium materials from blue box programs. What do you think, would it work?

I was pleasantly surprised to see that, in Ontario, wind power was at about 1/4 the power generated as coal in 2009. That’s according to Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO). According to an IESO release, “Wind output from Ontario’s commercial wind farms was 2.3 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2009, equivalent to the consumption of the City of Oshawa for two full years. At the same time, output from Ontario’s coal-fired plants dropped to 9.8 TWh, down dramatically from 23.2 TWh in 2008, and the lowest output in 45 years.” That’s great news.

I don’t like coal for a bunch of reasons. First, we have to mine it. That means stripping habitats bare and putting people’s lives at risk, whether from the dangers of the immediate job or from long-term exposure to a dirty carcinogen. Second, burning coal releases not only carbon dioxide, a key gas that’s causing climate change, but also a bunch of other harmful substances, including mercury. Those pollutants get into our air and water and severely effect our health.

So, what’s the cost of quadrupling our wind-power generation capacity so we can eliminate coal entirely? Well, what’s the health care cost linked to damage by airborne pollutants? I hope that the province starts to put together the numbers across the big picture.

Here’s how we fueled Ontario’s power usage in 2009:
Nuclear: 55.3 per cent
Hydroelectric: 25.5 per cent
Natural gas: 10.3 per cent
Coal: 6.6 per cent
Wind turbines: 1.6 per cent
Biomass, solar, other: 0.8 per cent

I’d love to see us embrace more local sources of electricity, so that we can use more of what we generate and so that we can rely on a lot of small-scale sources, like solar panels on office buildings. So much power is lost between where it’s generated and where it’s used. Hopefully we’ll get a better power grid so this would be possible. In the meantime, I buy my household power from a renewable energy supplier.

Do you think we can close our coal plants?

After seeing the new Sherlock Holmes movie tonight, my partner and my folks and I stepped out of the theatre into a snow globe. Or so it appeared — it was a total whiteout.

With only about 55 kilometres to travel, it’s usually an easy trip, but since we had to creep along at less than half the speed limit, and since it was somewhat easier to see without any lights on at all, just watching the ghost of the guard rail along the edge of the St. Lawrence River, the drive took a little longer than usual.

Big storms like tonight’s are a good reminder of the power of nature. The storm was scary, but as the big white flakes settled lightly upon everything, they made everything beautiful.

No doubt it’s tough to stare down emissions targets in the midst of a global recession. With so many individual interests squaring off against global interests in the carbon-reduction game, it’s surprising that delegates to the UN Climate Change Conference have been able to hammer out any sort of a framework. But they have.

The proposed Copenhagen Accord seeks to limit increases in world temperature (compared to “pre-industrial times”) to 2 degrees C “to avert impacts such as floods, heat waves, species extinctions and rising ocean levels.” The Accord also sets out carbon emission reductions worldwide by 50 per cent by 2050.

It sounds like, in the final hours of the negotiations, various parties are coming in with a hose and watering down the language, such as leaving the timeframe the Accord must be finalized by open-ended. As the minutes tick by toward day’s end, I hope that the thousands of determined individuals at the conference can keep the Accord meaningful.

Our biodiversity and our security depend on action, and I think our sense of hope for the future does as well. It all depends on whether we’re prepared to make sacrifices and endure change today that will lead to a much healthier tomorrow. Or, that is, whether our leaders are prepared to sign on the dotted line and make those changes.

What do you think: Is it better to have a watered-down agreement than no agreement at all? Or should we hold out for a more ambitious Accord?

There’s something exciting about a $50 bill (although it now longer features the Snowy Owl). And even more so about a Sir Robert Borden’s $100 bill. It’s paper full of potential. I don’t get the same kind of excitement when holding my debit card. And yet I’m prepared to forego crisp bills with beautiful designs and beautiful coins that commemorate events. I think I’d prefer digital cash.

Quick to transfer across accounts and accessible via internet from computers and smart phones, digital money is just more efficient. If you’re paid electronically you’re paid faster, without concern that your cheque got lost in the mail. (I’m amazed that cheques, essentially a piece of paper promising to pay, are still used so much!) Analog money, on the other hand, takes a lot of energy and other resources to make, transport and protect, and hey, it can even carry viruses, according to this article.

I think the missing link is a system we can use to transfer sums to each other easily. It’s no problem to send cash now — I often use Interac money transfers to send money to friends, since you only need an email address to do so. But for small purchases and people you don’t know, we need a way to transfer money.

I’m betting that, before long, we’ll use our phones for this. I’ll just enter an amount into my phone, hold it up to your phone, and “bip!” you’ll have five bucks. Ditto for paying for a public transit fare, a parking meter, a vending machine purchase and so on. And if I lose my phone, or it’s stolen, I don’t lose my money — it’s safe behind a password-protected connection to my bank.

What do you think, could you do without paper (and metal) money?

With 105 world leaders coming in for the UN Climate Change Summit, which runs from today to Dec. 17 in Denmark, it’d be easy for the conference to have a hefty carbon footprint. It seems those running the COP15 conference are keen to avoid the irony of a global conference, which is aiming to save the earth from catastrophic effects of climate change, producing undue carbon in the process.

Perhaps there’s something to learn from their strategies for running your own green meeting, trade or consumer show or a conference.

- Conference delegates will get a free public transportation pass to use throughout the summit. Apparently the Copenhagen metro system was recently voted the best in the world, making it the most efficient way to travel in terms of both time and carbon. Armoured cars will still be used for world leaders, of course.
- Rather than giving gift bags at the summit, Denmark is using the money they would have spent (approx. $700,000) on a climate scholarship for 10-12 students around the world to complete a 2-year Masters program at a Danish university.
- Tap water will be distributed at the conference; plastic bottles won’t be provided. Sounds like BYORWB (bring your own reuseable water bottle) is the order of the day!
- Over 3,500 hotel rooms reserved for conference visitors have a certificate in sustainable hotel management.
- There is a 55-metre windmill right next to the conference centre for the ultimate in local renewable energy. For the rest of us, perhaps we could purchase power for our events from a renewable energy supplier.
- To top it off, COP15 will offset their C02 emissions from delegate visits, local transportation, the conference centre itself by creating 20 new brickworks facilities in Dhaka, Bangladesh. According to this site, the new technology used will “reduce coal consumption during brick production by 50 percent… and emit an annual 100,000 tonnes less CO2 into the atmosphere than the old kilns.”

To listen to Jan-Christoph Napierski, Head of Sustainability at the conference, describe the challenges in reducing the impact of the event, click here.

Have you taken steps to reduce waste in your meetings and events?

According to Trees Ontario, a non-profit tree planting group, “We are not planting nearly enough [trees] each year, particularly on our rural landscape. Experts say that in order to reforest and achieve an average of 30 per cent forest cover and regain the healthy ecosystem we need to plant about a billion more trees across southern Ontario.”

Wow, that’s a lot of trees. But rather than get overwhelmed, we can all try to make a dent in that number. I’ve had the opportunity to help out with some tree plantings around the Don River in Toronto, a very fun experience. For the holidays, Trees Ontario has an affordable holiday donation program. At the starting level, you can have 10 trees planted for $25, and you can buy the donation in someone else’s name, the ultimate “green” gift.

Through a story in Homemakers magazine, I learned that it’s better to buy a real Christmas tree every year than a fake one, because of the energy required to make an artificial tree. And then there’s the fact that, once they look tatty, they’ll sit in the landfill forever.

Conversely, a real tree comes from a tree farm. While I wouldn’t call a tree farm a natural habitat, I’d say they’re a good use of rural land, they’re a source of local jobs, and while they’re growing, the trees provide cooling, prevent erosion and capture harmful gasses, as shown here. But rather than purchase a cut tree, I’m looking for a potted tree, something native to Ontario that I can plant in my yard this spring. Then we’ll be at 999,999,999 trees to go!

Are you getting a Christmas tree this year?