Employing your butt to save trees

Americans talk a good game when it comes to the environment, but most of us aren't willing to do much of anything at all. Are you willing to ride the bus, carpool, cut down on your consumption of meat, eat produce only in-season? No thanks," say most Americans. That's my personal experience, based on talking with numerous "concerned" citizens. Most people that I talk with tell me that they will make changes only when the "market" makes it worth their while. It's crazy, but that's the way it is. How about this option: Would you be willing to use one roll of recycled toilet paper per year if it would save 425,000 trees? Resoundingly, America has said "no thanks," according to Time Magazine:

[A] mainstream brand, Scott, started offering toilet paper made with 40% recycled fiber. Switching to such material could make a big difference: the NRDC estimates that if every household in the U.S. replaced just one 500-sheet roll of virgin-fiber TP a year with a roll made from 100% recycled paper, nearly 425,000 trees would be saved annually. . . Hence Greenpeace's four-year-long campaign to pressure paper companies . . . to stop cutting down virgin forests. . .

It's possible — but few Americans are doing it. Toilet paper containing 100% recycled fiber makes up less than 2% of the U.S. market, while sales of three-ply luxury brands like Cottonelle Ultra and Charmin Ultra Soft shot up 40% in 2008.

Considering that the average family uses about 20 rolls of toilet paper per month, NRDC's suggestion is not a laughing matter. Based on my conversations with lots of people, though, being responsible to the environment is truly a laughing matter for most Americans. They just don't get it, unless it affects their pocketbooks.

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HVAC sanity in Japan

How often have you gone into a store or business in the summer, where you needed to wear a sweater or coat to stay comfortably warm? Think movie theaters, for example. No doubt, Americans waste a lot of energy over-cooling in the summer and over-warming in the winter. Think of those businesses that keep their doors open in the winter, heat spilling out into the frigid outdoors. When we bought a Christmas tree this year, the lot was using propane heaters to heat the outdoors. As reported by Newsweek, Japan is using common sense in an effort to make itself less dependent on foreign fuel and in an effort to reduce carbon emissions:

In 2005, Environment Minister Yuriko Koike, a pioneering female politician, was seeking ways to slash energy use. And she came up with the Cool Biz campaign. The idea: Government would cut energy bills by keeping thermostats in its buildings at 28 degrees Celsius—82.4 degrees Fahrenheit—during the summer. It quickly produced results and was adopted by the business establishment as well. Since Japan's energy mavens realized that simply unbuttoning a shirt collar can make people feel about 4 degrees cooler, dressing down became part of the Cool Biz mentality. (Here's an ABC News story on the phenomenon.) The only people we met with this week wearing suits, ties, and cufflinks were Americans.

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Medicating the kids . . .

As a parent, I have participated in many discussions regarding the medication of kids for a variety of reasons. I have friends who have kids with serious problems for whom medication has been a godsend, allowing them to function with relative normalcy. Kids who were unable to participate in a typical classroom for one behavioral issue or another. We've also had many discussions about the problem of over-medicating children, and how some schools push for difficult children to receive behavioral meds, whether they truly need them or not. How some of those adult medications should perhaps not be so quickly prescribed for children. We've talked about education reform, changes in teaching methods and school culture and administrative philosophies that would allow for wider ranges of learning styles. I've heard parents rant about how unfair it is for their well-behaved child to not receive the same level of attention as the "problem kid" in the class commands, and I've seen them answered by the parents of said problem kids with an invitation to trade shoes, just for a day.

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Now you can pay for the convenience of water!

This is now the second time in a few months that I've gotten the following piece of junk mail: This letter is advertising a promotion in which, for thirty-two dollars a month and up, I can pay to have bottled water delivered to my door. What a brilliant idea! How could you beat that for convenience? Oh, that's right . . . Instead of paying for Poland Spring water at the rate of about $1.64 per gallon, I could get clean, fresh, drinkable water of any temperature I please straight from the tap in my kitchen. I don't know exactly how much this costs me, but I can say with complete confidence that it's a lot less than a dollar per gallon. Clearly, Poland Spring doesn't want you to think too hard about the economics of this. However, for the environmentally conscious consumer, this mailing also has a page touting their green credentials: Bottled Water Junk Mail Recycling 900,000 bottles and keeping 1.8 million pounds of plastic out of landfills is certainly very impressive. But, the skeptic in me has to ask, wouldn't it be much better for people to just use their perfectly good existing public infrastructure for drinking water, and not have to manufacture all that plastic in the first place? The bottled-water industry is one of the great triumphs of modern marketing: creating demand for a product for which there's absolutely no genuine need, selling at exorbitant cost a substance which any person in the Western world can obtain virtually for free. Even more absurd, despite its imagery of glaciers and mountain springs, most bottled water comes from municipal sources - i.e., the same water you get from your tap anyway. What bottled water really represents is almost pure profit for the beverage conglomerates that sell it, and unnecessary environmental harm caused by the expenditure of fossil fuels needed to manufacture, pack and ship it (not to mention sending out all this junk mail touting it). It's no healthier than the water that comes from the tap in your house. It doesn't even taste better. What on earth could convince a person to pay money for a scheme as ridiculous as this?

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How to slow global warming: paint all of the roofs white

What can we do to slow global warming? Steven Chu suggests that one way would be to paint our roofs white:

Professor Steven Chu, the US Energy Secretary, said the unusual proposal would mean homes in hot countries would save energy and money on air conditioning by deflecting the sun's rays.

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