Book: Choose to Reuse

Here's a great book (acquired the pic from Amazon.com but you should always see if your local bookstore has it, first) to get a handle on the issues and solutions to the items you use everyday. This struck my fancy while perusing Choose to Reuse: Two-way envelopes. Netflix does something like this out of necessity, but you still have to tear off that annoying flap and throw it away. Sheppard has just such an envelope, called the Boomerang which they say uses 25% less paper than normal mailing options for, say, billing.

Building your own sand castle

I read this article in Mother Earth News awhile back (and I can't find the exact article in their online archives but they have a lot of great green building articles) about sustainable, cheap housing made from sandbags. This notion stuck with me and I've been thinking about it a lot lately. Some friends of ours have a beautiful piece of property outside the city where we live, and they've been saving for a few years to build a permanent house on the land. Well, they finally concluded that the price of materials was just going to be too high, and so they've decided to put work into renovating their double-wide and putting in a swimming pool. It was an okay compromise for them, but it makes me frustrated that these people -- good, hardworking people -- cannot afford to build a permanent structure for themselves and their two children.
Then, yesterday I was IM'ing with a friend in NYC who is set to retire, move into the country with her partner, and build a home. I half-jokingly suggested that they build out of sandbags, and she said, "I'm not living in sand!" and that was that. But I got to thinking about it later and so here is what I've come up with on the subject and let you, the reader, decide:

Here is a great first article in Architecture Week about the pheonom, and talks about Nader Khalili, the architect who is "weaning the world off of two-by-fours, steel, and concrete."

Sean Sand's Papercrete House is an entirely different way of looking at recycled building materials. We think of recycling old houses and maybe using a good looking window or door, or old wood floors that are still in good condition, but Sean Sand is using an ancient building technique by combining cement and sand with things like newspapers and magazines: "'Glossy' magazines work fine -- in fact, they are preferred, because the "slick" magazine paper contains clay, which is beneficial to the mix." Yeah, man!

Last but not least is the quintessential website to go to get an overall impression of the craft of Green Homebuilding and all the many mutations and projects done by others, books written about it, and pictures galore (and where the one for this entry comes from).

It's thrilling, and if I were a more goal-oriented person I would buy up what cheap real estate is left in this part of the world and build a whole eco-community! Could you imagine a subdivision made entirely of adobe sandbag houses, each with their own little front yard vegetable garden? A patchouli-fragranced paradise, I say!

All Things Biodiesel

All Things Biodiesel

Just saw this on Blogger and thought this is something to blog quickly about on my way to blog about other things. This is pretty facinating stuff -- Eric Bowen, the creator of All Things Biodiesel, is an investment banker for the biodiesel industry as well as being the president of a SanFrancisco-based biodiesel cooperative (www.sfbiofuels.org). Of note is a letter to the California Air Resources Board that basically outlines the fundamental reasons why biodiesel is a good alternative fuel. While I'm still wary of biodiesel as the silver bullet (or one of many silver bullets) to our current oil woes, I think that people like Mr. Bowen are searching for ways to help the environment, our people, and the economy in honest and honorable ways.

Paper, Plastic, Cloth, Or Nothing?

I've been trying to go to cloth shopping bags at the store which really wows the bag boys and girls who fumble to hold the darn things open and stuff them with my groceries. The manufacturers of plastic grocery bags make it so, so easy to use them at the checkout lane that you can see the look of consternation that crosses their faces when presented with a saggy stack of canvas bags (which the store chain I shop at sells, by the way). Lately, however, I've been forgetting the bags altogether when I enter the grocery store and at first I resigned myself to getting the plastic bags but then I had an epiphany: Why not say "no" to bagging? So, I've been using this strategy when I forget the cloth bags and it's been working. The bag people seem a little thrown when I ask them to just put the items back in the cart as-is, but hey, they should be thanking me for not having to hassle with any bagging of any sort! The trouble comes when I have a hand basket and ask them to just put the items back in after they've been scanned. The cashier is all like, "you want to take the basket out of the store?" I have to reassure them that I will bring the basket back after placing the items in my car. We've been so acculturated to bring only the wheeled carts out of the store.

Compact

Compact

A fellow Blogspot blog and one that Delicious G would cotton to: These are folks who made a compact to not buy anything new. I'm still reading it and am not entirely sure if they've made this compact for a year or if it's a forever thing. It's cool though, so give a read (even if they've been slack since June) and think a little bit about the implications of not buying any new crap for a WHOLE FREAKIN' YEAR! Yow.

Will update on these guys sometime soon when I have a better handle on them.

The Ride Along Saga

Hoping to pick up more on the blogging -- not sure how, but am taking a quick stab at it while the old man and Dude Junior are out on GNO (Guys Night Out). We bought a ride-along (this one, from amazon.com, in fact) for my bike since our son has now almost reached the weight limit for the bike carrier. I put it together and hooked it up and me and the boy took a spin on it down our street. This lasted for about 90 yards before I heard horrified whimpering from the back. We walked back to the house and DJ told me that he didn't like the fact that it didn't have training wheels and was too wobbly without them. I had read this same complaint from people who had bought this item, but we're trying to make a go of riding to campus instead of taking the car. So, I dutifully bought a pair of training wheels and put them on last night. It was a busy day today so we didn't have a chance to try out the new set up, but I ended up taking a short ride on it after the boys had gone, just to see how it would work. The training wheels, hard plastic, make a terrible racket on the pavement but I kept going. Riding on the path beside the park I lost one of the wheels, put it back on, and then lost it again a few yards later. Put the wheel in my bag and turned around to go home. The ride along is a lot more stable with the wheels and if I tighten the darn things properly maybe they'll stay the heck on. Next, we'll try a ride with DJ actually on it.