Recycling at Work

I am the Assistant Manager at the best pizza joint in town, and it's in our historic downtown area. The area is fairly walkable, although tourists and employees of local businesses have difficulty parking in the area.

The building I work in has a hot dog joint next door and 2 floors of apartment upstairs. I think there are 10-12 apartments in the building. Yay for mixed use! Boo for an old building that desperately needs renovation. Our water pressure changes when someone upstairs takes a shower or uses the only washer in the building. There's a certain spot in the kitchen where you can smell pot smoke if someone upstairs happens to be partaking. Every once in a while a small animal makes it inside the building, sometimes even into the restaurant!!

The Town requires any restaurant selling alcohol to recycle the glass bottle or aluminum can the alcohol comes in. But they are not required to recycle anything else, so they don't. Some restaurants and shopping centers have corrugated cardboard recycling, but our small building doesn't! I didn't realize this until I had been working there for a few months; I was helping carry boxes upstairs and out the back of the building to where I thought a cardboard dumpster would be!

That was when I decided to take recycling matters into my own hands.

Every day, I load my car up with corrugated cardboard boxes, beer boxes, aluminum and steel cans, and plastic bottles. There are two recycling convenience centers between work and home, so for me this isn't a big deal. I have been recycling everything at home for the last 5 years or so. My husband has taken some training, and every once in a while he still throws away something that can be recycled. (I usually see it and fish it out rather quickly.)

Over the last 2 years, I have managed to train my fellow workers to stop throwing recycling away. New employees are trained to recycle! The night shift will leave boxes or empty cleaning supply bottles for me to recycle the next day if they know I'm coming in. I occasionally get teased for pulling recycling out of the trash barrel, (don't worry, I always wash my hands after!) but I am reinforcing the importance of recycling to the 15 people I work with.

Ethanol

This weekend my husband and I travelled from North Carolina to Maryland for my Dad's funeral.

My car gets pretty good gas mileage on the highway, which is good for our wallets! We filled the tank up just outside of town. We made it all the way to Maryland and were able to drive around the area before having to refill on the way back home. We filled the tank right before getting on the interstate near our hotel. We made it almost halfway home and realized we were running low on gas!! Apparently Maryland adds 10% ethanol to their gas. My car did not like that one bit.

We paid the EXACT same amount per gallon, but our mpg were so much lower!

So.....why are we adding ethanol to our fuel?

"Weather Report" (2008)

Yesterday we watched the movie "Weather Report" in my SD class. It showed how the changing climate has affected local weather.

In the most northern parts of Canada, ice is melting at an extremely rapid rate. In February 2006, the temperature jumped from -26 degrees to 5 degrees and poured rain. Caches of frozen caribou meat were ruined and many ice floes broke off.

In the Gansu Province, China, sand from the Gobi desert is moving quickly, forcing entire villages to move. The sand can move six to seven meters a year. Schoolchildren plant trees in an attempt to keep the sand from moving into other areas. The trees have a survival rate of less than 50%.

In Montana, a reservoir for farmland irrigation is running dry. Many families have already had to sell their land and move because crops are dying.

The flooding of Mumbai, India in 2005 devastated much of the city, especially the poor. The city was built on a floodplain, and many locals believed that the government did not do enough during the disaster and were not planning for future floods.

The Sahel, in Africa, is used to droughts, but the used to occur only every five to ten years. The area has been in a persistent drought for about five years. Food is incredibly scare, and environmental refugee camps have been set up in some areas. Humanitarian relief groups have been bringing in food and water to these camps, but many times it is not enough. There is a program, lead by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai, which plants trees in the hopes of returning some of the forests that used to exist in the area.

This movie is great for showing exactly what is happening and putting faces with the people being affected the most by climate change. It shows very dramatic scenes and can, at times, be a little over the top. While the movie shows the present, it offers no solutions for the future. Some super-high-tech/low-emissions inventions are shown, but no real way of effectively reducing greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale.

The American Chestnut, part 1

For my semester long project on the American Chestnut I had to read and summarize a scholarly article for tomorrow. My article was published in the Journal of Biogeography in 2002 and is titled "Chestnut: history and ecology of a transformed tree".

I found this article very interesting because the author argues that the American chestnut is not in the process of extinction, it is just being transformed. Because the blight that affects the chestnuts attacks them once they reach a height of 15 meters, the chestnuts have adapted themselves to be smaller, more shrub-like, instead of tall, canopy-dominant trees.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries chestnuts accounted for more than 50% of harvested timber in the eastern US, which made the chestnut important economically.

Unfortunately, since many people saw that the chestnuts were dying from the blight, most of them were cut down, even though there are still some tall chestnuts standing today. There are some near Blowing Rock that I am going to try to get some pictures of for my project. Once I find them and get pictures I will post them on here.

Don't forget to check out The American Chestnut Foundation's website!

"Food, Inc"

"Food, Inc" is a documentary about our nation's food sources, including industrialized corn and meat products. Also featured is Polyface Farms, a small local "beyond organic" farm. This film is incredibly informative and disturbing. Please do not watch this while eating!

Food, Inc on IMDB

Food, Inc website

Tagline: You'll never look at dinner the same way again.

Winter Heating

Although I live in North Carolina, I'm in the mountains where it can get very cold in the winter. This winter has been especially nasty, with over 80 inches of snow this season. We have had ice storms and blizzards this year that have done tremendous damage to the area. The worst ice storm this season was during Christmas; three counties were in a state of emergency with power outages all over for 2-4 days. In the aftermath of this storm my husband has spent many hours collecting downed trees for us to use as firewood.

Many people might think heating with wood instead of fossil fuels is still bad for the environment. Considering that all of the wood we heat our house with is storm damage or dead trees that could fall and damage our home, we believe that heating our home this way is much better for the environment. As trees die, they begin to release all of the carbon they have been storing into the atmosphere. Why not harness the energy of the trees instead of letting them rot? All that carbon will be released anyway!

Now, to be honest, we live in an older home that is not insulated well, so we do have to use a small amount of oil to help keep our house 'comfortable', especially when the wind is gusting over 60 mph! We have had warmer temperatures for the last week or so, and our oil heat has only been used at night, once the sun is no longer helping to warm the house. The oil heat has not been used at all in the last 36 hours or so, which is helping us to save money!

Holy Crap, I'm Blogging!

Well I guess this is my first post on my first blog. I hope to use this blog to inform and educate anyone who reads this about sustainable and green news, innovations, and ideas. Much of my information will concern 'The High Country', which is the region in which I live. The southern region of the Appalachian Mountains, northwest North Carolina, is where I have called home for the last eight years. As a student of sustainability, I am currently working on a project focusing on the restoration of the American Chestnut in the Appalachian region. As I work on this project, I will post what I am learning about why the American Chestnut is important to this area and how organizations are working to bring the American Chestnut back to its native habitat.