Just to advocate the unpopular for a moment, it could be that a consuming more means a need for more energy which eventually leads to needing new ways to create energy.
So, consumption drives innovation to enable more consumption and so on.
Why shouldn't we exploit everyone in less developed countries when we can rationalize it away by saying some theoretical model totally allows for our behavior?
You are of course joking, because the absurdity of 'trying to use more energy' for something that can be done more efficiently, aka 'wasting' energy to be considered more 'advanced', according to an arbitrary scale, is immediately obvious. : )
> Five months into the experiment, after some initial reservations, I gave up toilet paper. Now I do things the way hundreds of millions (including my extended family) in India do — with water and my left hand.
That's pretty gross. What's the delta for the energy cost of doing that, its use of extra water and extra heat and extra soap for the water to clean his hand, with the energy cost of a few squares of toilet paper and less water and heat and soap?
That one struck me as a "wait, what!?" as well, especially considering a few paragraphs down, there's:
We don’t have to go back in time to heed environmental boundaries.
..pretty sure not using sanitary toilet paper in favor of touching feces is "going back in time", and I'd place using more water as a greater environmental issue than using less of a product that can be made from recycled things anyways.
> using more water as a greater environmental issue
He's in Michigan, they're not running out anytime soon. The water gets recycled too, in minutes/hours instead of decades for trees. It's going back to (probably) the same lake it came from, not letting it evaporate on a farmer's field.
You have to wash your hand in both cases. And from experience, I do not think using toilet paper means that I used less water and soap when washing my hand.
Hopefully you wash your hands after using the bathroom, regardless of if you use your hand to physically remove matter from your body. But a quick google gave me 37 gallons, 1.3 kWh, 1.5 lbs of wood per roll of toilet paper. That is a hefty amount of consumption that is flushed down the toilet.
http://www.treehugger.com/bathroom-design/stop-using-toilet-...
My first reaction was extreme anger at your first statement. Now that I have cooled down a bit,
Would you ever consider rubbing yourself with paper a valid realistic alternative to showering?
Then WHY are you more comfortable with merely rubbing the shit off you, at the dirtiest part of your body (than cleaning it using water, and washing it, like your wash the rest of your body).
Those that use hands at least have clean butts and clean hands (most do wash hands now!) -- you, on the other hand can't be completely confident about one.
An analogy I always like was whether you'd be happy enough wiping your hand with a paper towel if you accidentally tripped and put your hand in dog feces.
I think the reasoning goes something like this: The anus should be assumed to be an unclean portion of the body, with the exception of directly after washing it with soap and water, and should always be treated under that assumption. By using paper in between the hand and anus when wiping you are attempting to avoid cross contamination with the hands, which is a part of the body that is understood to be much cleaner. Simply avoiding contact between the two areas is the most direct route to maintain this distinction. Washing your hands with soap and water after wiping serves as a further action to maintain the usefulness of the hands.
You will notice that I highlighted soap above, I do this because I believe it is the key factor often missed in discussions like this. You can argue that hand + water can make your anus appear cleaner than hand + paper, but without soap it is at best marginally more sanitary for your anus, and significantly less sanitary for your hand. There is a reason we clean our bodies with soap and water, not just water.
The problem is that only institutional toilet paper -- the kind used in hospitals and prisons -- actually maintains any kind of separation between hand body. The kind that everybody actually uses just absorbs and distributes fecal matter.
> Would you ever consider rubbing yourself with paper a valid realistic alternative to showering?
Yes, all the time, for many classes of uncleanliness. Pants and paper towels are amazing. I'm careful with your wording, though -- those are an alternative, not a substitute, and especially an alternative for right now. If I had infinite time I'd love to take a full shower after every crap. If I worked up the slightest sweat bead on my forehead, I'd love to go shower and cool down immediately rather than rub against my shirt or a paper towel and continuing with what I was doing.
One day I might get a fancy Japanese toilet. For now, wiping is a fine alternative to a full shower and even in the gross cases of not washing hands afterwards you're still going to be less likely to spread disease than you would be in a culture where touching things with the left hand is frowned upon. As you say, I can be sure about one, and it's the most important one from a public health standpoint given that the other even if not super clean is contained until shower time.
I was unaware that using toilet paper meant I couldn't ever shower. It seems strange that a person should only ever be allowed to use one method to clean themselves.
No, actually it's pretty sanitary. After having lived in Morocco for more than a year, using paper feels dirty. And it is - your behind is much cleaner when treated with water.
How does it work? I get that a bidet is going to be cleaner than paper, but it seems like the continuous stream is an important factor. I can't really visualize how using a wet hand is going to do anything but make a mess. Sure, you wash your hand afterwards...but you just wiped a bunch of unsanitary water around a place that doesn't get a lot of fresh air.
Water power seems sufficient. I mean, I've not done swab tests post rinsing. It strikes me as better than smearing with paper until I can see any more residue on the paper.
I knew someone from a culture that washes their rear with soap and water after defecating. I was told they refer to Americans as "unclean ass" and are horrified that we just use paper and do not wash.
Does anyone know of any good systematic studies of the waste / environmental costs of various activities, purchases, etc.?
I suspect that e.g. living in a smaller house or apartment, driving less and driving a smaller vehicle (more generally, living in an urban area with less pavement and other infrastructure per capita compared to suburbs), better insulating buildings (or constructing them with other passive heating/cooling) and scaling back the temperature control, using less hot water or heating it less, reducing water use on yards/landscaping, reducing use of energy-intensive gadgets (e.g. drying clothes on a line, using a smaller television), consuming less meat and dairy, buying local vegetables in season instead of shipped thousands of miles, and otherwise eating more canned food and recycling the cans, taking local vacations vs. traveling internationally, etc. might have more effect than explicitly trying to optimize only for quantity of personal trash generated.
One problem with our current economy is that our prices do a terrible job at signaling true costs, and the whole system is so complex that any individual person has almost no chance at guessing correctly, if trying to organize their life to reduce external impact. (So much of the price we pay is distorted by some clever company arbitraging international tax differences, cheating regulatory controls, defrauding poor countries and bribing their officials to cover it up, or dumping unlimited toxic shit in places without any oversight.)
It’s like trying to optimize code without a profiler.
As one small example, I’d love to see some kind of systemic analysis of the comparative environmental costs of ordering something online and having it delivered in a truck from a warehouse wrapped in cardboard and then recycling the cardboard vs. driving a single person in a large car to and from a store 10 miles away, including the land and energy costs of keeping inventory in the local stores, employing the cashiers, etc. Personally I little idea what the total impacts are of these two choices.
Directly, or indirectly, I'd say that the price of a product does a good job of the value of resources expended in getting it to you.
This includes:
The cost/time of the marketers of the product, the cost/time of its production, the cost/time of whatever services are paid for through taxes on that product, etc.
I just wish taxes did a better job of taxing relatively irreversible destruction (like oxidizing 100m old C-C and C-H bonds).
If you spend less money, you burn up fewer things in the process, which I think your examples exhibit quite well. Though I'd suggest that flying/trucking food thousands of kilometers means expending less energy than preserving it or risking spoilage. The food may be fresher to boot too.
Price is typically a very good indicator. (I use it as well.) The only weakness is that it assumes the "exchange rate" between dollars and resources are equal in all circumstances. This is likely not always the case when the cheaper option is sourced from a country with less pollution or human rights regulations.
I don't think that's a great model as a brentling watch and a Honda civic hardly took the same resources to produce. A new 900sf condo in DC takes few resources compared to a new 20,000 sf house in West Virginia even if there both 500k.
So what happens with the $15k that gets spent on the watch or the $X00k on the condo? The sellers aren't burying the resources in the ground, they're spending it on other stuff, like jet vacations, a low mpg vehicle, a big home in the country, etc.
That gets into the fixed pie fallicy, if I buy your house and you buy my house we can have an economic transaction where both sides benifit and no resources are lost.
In the watch example it's possible to pay with cash and have the money distroyed after the fact etc. As such taking about potential future resources to be spent is irrelevant when taking about the resources consumed to create something.
I too would be interested in studies. But I do think environmental cost is factored in to the cost of most things, especially if due to environmental damage it is no longer possible to get a Thing at any price. I think the true cost of a single pencil is well reflected. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8
The problem with the profiler analogy is that economic costs can open up economic gains, whereas wasting billions of cycles in a dumb loop opens up nothing. If you analyzed the human activities that produce the most environmental cost, the individual contributions would be nothing. Only when you look at economies of scale driven by collections of people do you get to anything remotely resembling significant numbers. And you might think "Let's ban all cars", since that's a somewhat noticeable effect in aggregate, but by doing so you would kill off many other parts of the economy. Depending on the reaction, it could be good or bad for the environment. It could be good if humanity went extinct and the costs we directly produce went to 0 (leaving only the 'natural' costs), but that's not a world I want to live in.
One thing I read about recently is discussion regarding whether building a new "environmentally friendly" building is better for the environment than reusing an older building.
"The study concludes that it can take between 10 and 80 years for a new, energy-efficient building to overcome, through more efficient operations, the negative energy and climate change impacts caused in the construction process." [1]
Regarding things packaged in cardboard, some office furniture companies offer "blanket-wrapped delivery" for their furniture to help reduce waste as the blankets end up being reused from delivery to delivery.
10 to 80 years seems pretty reasonable since most are used beyond that point -- and then come along with a bunch of extra benefits like being safer, more precise with HVAC, etc.
This is wonderful and I've been trying to drastically reduce my consumption for about a year now. I cannot over-emphasize how difficult it is, and not even from an implementation standpoint.
The problem isn't the person trying to consume less, it's everyone else. Everywhere you go (in NYC) you get bombarded with packaging. Going to get a cup of coffee involves a paper cup, a plastic lid, 5 napkins, and then they throw it all in a brown paper bag. I've seen people buy a soda at the bodega and with it comes napkins, a straw, both in a brown bag and then all of that in a plastic bag! I watch in horror the person pull the can out, throw everything else away, drink the can and then toss that out too.
I start to wonder how far removed we all are from the landfills and production to be completely oblivious to this insane level of waste. The worst part about it is that when you repeatedly say "no bag, thank you" you get looked down upon like some loony toon who can't function in society correctly.
Coffee in a bag is the most hilarious thing in NYC. And the coffee is awful, of course.
I decided to give up paper coffee cups a few years ago. Now if I'm in a hurry I just order an espresso and drink it on the spot, or if I'm not I order a drip coffee and spend a few minutes relaxing and drinking it.
Of course, NYC has a bad relationship with the environment. They love trash there.
I made a few exceptions. I couldn’t always control other people’s behavior, so junk mail wouldn’t count as my own recycling. I wasn’t going to be a boor and instruct a dinner-party host on how to reduce his or her trash. And if someone gave me a gift — a token offered from the heart — I accepted it. Also, I was working on my aerospace engineering Ph.D. in an experimental combustion lab, and my research required many single-use materials: Mylar, latex gloves, ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (milk carton material), optical cleaning wipes and so on. If I wanted to conduct quality research and finish my dissertation, I’d have to separate requirements inside the lab from my habits outside it.
So, his junk mail, social life and job/education did not count. I wonder how much those things account for the typical 1500 pounds annually and how much trash he "produced" that way without counting it.
If we're counting anecdata, the amount of junk mail I receive could probably fit into a shopping bag.
The amount of gifts + wrapping I get could probably fit into three, but I also make it pretty clear that I don't really need material gifts.
My job is a fucking disaster, I drank at least twelve cans of carbonated water today, and I currently have literally six at my desk, not all of which are empty. I wish we had a soda fountain.
I've recently considered doing this, not because I particularly care about generating a moderate amount of trash, but rather because I think that this would be an excellent mindfulness exercise!
I live on a couple of acres and there is no trash collection. We have to take all our trash into town.
I started composting a year or so ago. Not little barrels or bins or anything like that. I wanted to the compost to get hot and be able to really bury green kitchen wastes so animals didn't pull it out. So every few months I have been buying a large (500-600 pound) bale of ruined moldy hay ($10 at a hay yard near here). I cut the strings and fluff the hay up with a pitchfork. Then I add a quart or so of fertilizer and wet it. Then I pile it into a cone and wet it again. The cones are about 5 feet tall initially with maybe a 5-6 foot diameter base. I keep my eyes open for any additional organic matter I can add. All the weeds, leaves, grass clippings... I even added some tall weeds I cut from the roadside this summer.
We bury anything compostable in the pile. All vegetable scraps, paper plates, paper towels, cardboard egg cartons, paper towel and toilet paper rolls, I even put in a couple of big (non-shiny) cardboard boxes that were completely consumed. About twice a month I turn the pile over. As the pile starts breaking down and shrinking to the point it doesn't really heat up anymore I start another one. At the end I have a tiny little pile of compost maybe 2.5 feet cubed. It's amazing how much all that stuff breaks down. It's a lot of work but the compost is really great for the lawn and gardens. I couldn't buy something of similar quality. I estimate it's cut our trash by about 1/3 and importantly it also keeps most organic matter out of the trash which makes it less stinky (we don't eat much meat and the dogs help with the scraps from the little we do). Composting is a lot of fun. It's like farming microbes.
57 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadSo, consumption drives innovation to enable more consumption and so on.
I'm going to assume that if you're on HN, you're generally an advocate of technological progress.
I could use very little energy by living like a caveman, but is that really the way to the future?
That's pretty gross. What's the delta for the energy cost of doing that, its use of extra water and extra heat and extra soap for the water to clean his hand, with the energy cost of a few squares of toilet paper and less water and heat and soap?
We don’t have to go back in time to heed environmental boundaries.
..pretty sure not using sanitary toilet paper in favor of touching feces is "going back in time", and I'd place using more water as a greater environmental issue than using less of a product that can be made from recycled things anyways.
He's in Michigan, they're not running out anytime soon. The water gets recycled too, in minutes/hours instead of decades for trees. It's going back to (probably) the same lake it came from, not letting it evaporate on a farmer's field.
Also, if you think it's gross then this is what you're looking for: http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Bidet-D1-Adjustable-Certification/... .
Would you ever consider rubbing yourself with paper a valid realistic alternative to showering?
Then WHY are you more comfortable with merely rubbing the shit off you, at the dirtiest part of your body (than cleaning it using water, and washing it, like your wash the rest of your body).
Those that use hands at least have clean butts and clean hands (most do wash hands now!) -- you, on the other hand can't be completely confident about one.
: )
An analogy I always like was whether you'd be happy enough wiping your hand with a paper towel if you accidentally tripped and put your hand in dog feces.
You will notice that I highlighted soap above, I do this because I believe it is the key factor often missed in discussions like this. You can argue that hand + water can make your anus appear cleaner than hand + paper, but without soap it is at best marginally more sanitary for your anus, and significantly less sanitary for your hand. There is a reason we clean our bodies with soap and water, not just water.
Yes, all the time, for many classes of uncleanliness. Pants and paper towels are amazing. I'm careful with your wording, though -- those are an alternative, not a substitute, and especially an alternative for right now. If I had infinite time I'd love to take a full shower after every crap. If I worked up the slightest sweat bead on my forehead, I'd love to go shower and cool down immediately rather than rub against my shirt or a paper towel and continuing with what I was doing.
One day I might get a fancy Japanese toilet. For now, wiping is a fine alternative to a full shower and even in the gross cases of not washing hands afterwards you're still going to be less likely to spread disease than you would be in a culture where touching things with the left hand is frowned upon. As you say, I can be sure about one, and it's the most important one from a public health standpoint given that the other even if not super clean is contained until shower time.
No, actually it's pretty sanitary. After having lived in Morocco for more than a year, using paper feels dirty. And it is - your behind is much cleaner when treated with water.
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/ABS-Toilet-Handheld-Bidet-Spr...
I suspect that e.g. living in a smaller house or apartment, driving less and driving a smaller vehicle (more generally, living in an urban area with less pavement and other infrastructure per capita compared to suburbs), better insulating buildings (or constructing them with other passive heating/cooling) and scaling back the temperature control, using less hot water or heating it less, reducing water use on yards/landscaping, reducing use of energy-intensive gadgets (e.g. drying clothes on a line, using a smaller television), consuming less meat and dairy, buying local vegetables in season instead of shipped thousands of miles, and otherwise eating more canned food and recycling the cans, taking local vacations vs. traveling internationally, etc. might have more effect than explicitly trying to optimize only for quantity of personal trash generated.
One problem with our current economy is that our prices do a terrible job at signaling true costs, and the whole system is so complex that any individual person has almost no chance at guessing correctly, if trying to organize their life to reduce external impact. (So much of the price we pay is distorted by some clever company arbitraging international tax differences, cheating regulatory controls, defrauding poor countries and bribing their officials to cover it up, or dumping unlimited toxic shit in places without any oversight.)
It’s like trying to optimize code without a profiler.
As one small example, I’d love to see some kind of systemic analysis of the comparative environmental costs of ordering something online and having it delivered in a truck from a warehouse wrapped in cardboard and then recycling the cardboard vs. driving a single person in a large car to and from a store 10 miles away, including the land and energy costs of keeping inventory in the local stores, employing the cashiers, etc. Personally I little idea what the total impacts are of these two choices.
If you spend less money, you burn up fewer things in the process, which I think your examples exhibit quite well. Though I'd suggest that flying/trucking food thousands of kilometers means expending less energy than preserving it or risking spoilage. The food may be fresher to boot too.
In the watch example it's possible to pay with cash and have the money distroyed after the fact etc. As such taking about potential future resources to be spent is irrelevant when taking about the resources consumed to create something.
The problem with the profiler analogy is that economic costs can open up economic gains, whereas wasting billions of cycles in a dumb loop opens up nothing. If you analyzed the human activities that produce the most environmental cost, the individual contributions would be nothing. Only when you look at economies of scale driven by collections of people do you get to anything remotely resembling significant numbers. And you might think "Let's ban all cars", since that's a somewhat noticeable effect in aggregate, but by doing so you would kill off many other parts of the economy. Depending on the reaction, it could be good or bad for the environment. It could be good if humanity went extinct and the costs we directly produce went to 0 (leaving only the 'natural' costs), but that's not a world I want to live in.
"The study concludes that it can take between 10 and 80 years for a new, energy-efficient building to overcome, through more efficient operations, the negative energy and climate change impacts caused in the construction process." [1]
Regarding things packaged in cardboard, some office furniture companies offer "blanket-wrapped delivery" for their furniture to help reduce waste as the blankets end up being reused from delivery to delivery.
[1] http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/the_green_divide...
The problem isn't the person trying to consume less, it's everyone else. Everywhere you go (in NYC) you get bombarded with packaging. Going to get a cup of coffee involves a paper cup, a plastic lid, 5 napkins, and then they throw it all in a brown paper bag. I've seen people buy a soda at the bodega and with it comes napkins, a straw, both in a brown bag and then all of that in a plastic bag! I watch in horror the person pull the can out, throw everything else away, drink the can and then toss that out too.
I start to wonder how far removed we all are from the landfills and production to be completely oblivious to this insane level of waste. The worst part about it is that when you repeatedly say "no bag, thank you" you get looked down upon like some loony toon who can't function in society correctly.
I decided to give up paper coffee cups a few years ago. Now if I'm in a hurry I just order an espresso and drink it on the spot, or if I'm not I order a drip coffee and spend a few minutes relaxing and drinking it.
Of course, NYC has a bad relationship with the environment. They love trash there.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-worlds-most-wasteful-me...
I made a few exceptions. I couldn’t always control other people’s behavior, so junk mail wouldn’t count as my own recycling. I wasn’t going to be a boor and instruct a dinner-party host on how to reduce his or her trash. And if someone gave me a gift — a token offered from the heart — I accepted it. Also, I was working on my aerospace engineering Ph.D. in an experimental combustion lab, and my research required many single-use materials: Mylar, latex gloves, ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (milk carton material), optical cleaning wipes and so on. If I wanted to conduct quality research and finish my dissertation, I’d have to separate requirements inside the lab from my habits outside it.
So, his junk mail, social life and job/education did not count. I wonder how much those things account for the typical 1500 pounds annually and how much trash he "produced" that way without counting it.
The amount of gifts + wrapping I get could probably fit into three, but I also make it pretty clear that I don't really need material gifts.
My job is a fucking disaster, I drank at least twelve cans of carbonated water today, and I currently have literally six at my desk, not all of which are empty. I wish we had a soda fountain.
I started composting a year or so ago. Not little barrels or bins or anything like that. I wanted to the compost to get hot and be able to really bury green kitchen wastes so animals didn't pull it out. So every few months I have been buying a large (500-600 pound) bale of ruined moldy hay ($10 at a hay yard near here). I cut the strings and fluff the hay up with a pitchfork. Then I add a quart or so of fertilizer and wet it. Then I pile it into a cone and wet it again. The cones are about 5 feet tall initially with maybe a 5-6 foot diameter base. I keep my eyes open for any additional organic matter I can add. All the weeds, leaves, grass clippings... I even added some tall weeds I cut from the roadside this summer.
We bury anything compostable in the pile. All vegetable scraps, paper plates, paper towels, cardboard egg cartons, paper towel and toilet paper rolls, I even put in a couple of big (non-shiny) cardboard boxes that were completely consumed. About twice a month I turn the pile over. As the pile starts breaking down and shrinking to the point it doesn't really heat up anymore I start another one. At the end I have a tiny little pile of compost maybe 2.5 feet cubed. It's amazing how much all that stuff breaks down. It's a lot of work but the compost is really great for the lawn and gardens. I couldn't buy something of similar quality. I estimate it's cut our trash by about 1/3 and importantly it also keeps most organic matter out of the trash which makes it less stinky (we don't eat much meat and the dogs help with the scraps from the little we do). Composting is a lot of fun. It's like farming microbes.