Considering water use

In New Zealand, most councils have moved to a water metering system, using loggers on the mains supply where it enters the property. There is a certain amount of use which is considered the 'base line', then households are billed for what is used above that.

Our household water use has always been quite low. We have always planted low maintenance gardens because, basically, we can't be bothered faffing about watering plants. We plant natives, and they grow by themselves. The main consumer of water was always our vegetable garden, our washing machine, and our dishwasher.

So when we built our own house way on a 10Ha block out in the country, one of the many things we considered was water. How we would get it, how we would store it, and how we would ensure that we had enough. We had long ago shifted to a front loader washing machine (because it used 66% less water than a top loader). I bought a Swedish dishwasher (washing up machine) that used less water than I would if I washed the dishes in the sink... and got them cleaner! That left us with pretty much only the vegetable garden as our largest water user, but as it fed us, it was a necessary use of water. The toilet moved up the list as a significant water consumer, so I bought dual flush toilets, and put a brick in each cistern to artificially reduce the water volume. Sorted.

In our planning process, we worked out how much roof space we had to collect rainwater, and how much tank volume we would need to store it. Then we could be sure that we could reasonably stay off a mains supply scheme. With 200 square metres of roof (sheds and house) and an average rainfall of .75m/annum, we put in 71,000 litres of storage tank capacity. We knew we had rain enough to fill the tank volume roughly four times each year.

The trickiest part was working out how much water we used annually. We knew we did not use more than the base-line rating level, because we didn't get water bills in the city. In the end, we decided to suck it and see. Well, in 11 years, we only ran out of water once (when the builders were building the house, and emptied the tanks by accident). I now know that we use between 1,000 and 2,000 litres of water a week, INCLUDING our garden. That average weekly use works out to about 78,000 litres/annum. Our tanks are always full.

Now, we are not hairy-toed stinkies who never wash. While we mostly shower (and have a water-conserving shower head), I love running a bath in winter and having a lovely soak. I just don't do it all the time. We know that water is a valuable resource, and - as we have to collect it and look after it - we need to ensure that we have enough for any time of scarcity.

Recently I was watching a DW documentary (2021), looking at water use in Las Vegas. They examined how the city was conserving water, with household use having fallen by a third. It all sounded great until I realised that in 2018, Las Vegan (!) households used an average of 100,920 gallons (Mullenix, 2020); an appallingly high 382,023 litres/annum. And that was with a 33% reduction! I was gobsmacked. I still am.

We use 78,000 litres of water per year, and Las Vegans use five times more water per year than we do (and their consumption used to be almost six and a half times ours!). I am still staggered that this was considered to be 'good'.

So I looked at what New Zealanders use on average. While not so ghastly as in Las Vegas, it is still high at 236,520 litres/year (2.7 people x 240L/day; Catley, 2017; Greater Wellington, 2011).

No wonder water is considered to be in short supply with use like that.

Sam

References:

Catley, C. (2017). What does the average New Zealand household look like?. https://rwtakapuna.co.nz/news/what-does-the-average-new-zealand-household-look-like

DW Documentary (30 May 2021). The world of water [video].https://youtu.be/YxzYzv8ijEs

Greater Wellington (2011). Section Five: How much water are we using?. http://www.gw.govt.nz/assets/Our-Environment/Water-Supply/PDFs/Turning-on-the-tap/Turning-on-the-tap-Section-5.pdf

Mullenix, B. (2020). The Average Water Bill In Las Vegas (See My Water Bills). https://www.feelingvegas.com/average-water-bill-las-vegas/

read more "Considering water use"

New Zealand: 100% waste

Earlier this year, an American tourist posted on his blog that we in New Zealand are in no way true to the "100% Pure New Zealand" label. I totally agree with him.

We can't sell our collected materials for recycling: what choice is there but to landfill? We can't even recycle our own plastic because no one is buying all our 'recycling'. As I have posted before (here), Kiwis consume 734kg of plastic each year, per person, with nowhere to send it to. So it mostly goes to landfill (there is a small PET recycling plant in Wellington, Flight Plastics: the only one of its kind in New Zealand). We have no ability to recycle aluminium in NZ so it goes to landfill unless the price justifies the shipping from here to Australia or Japan. There is only one steel resmelter for the North Island, nothing in the South Island, so the SI stuff goes to landfill. I could go on... oh, I am.

In Europe Sweden burns their non-recyclable everything at highly efficient furnace plants which generate electricity. The plants have amazing particulate scrubbers so nothing toxic goes into the atmosphere, and I think even the stuff trapped in their scrubbers can go back into the furnaces. But that requires lots of infrastructure which we don't have in New Zealand.

In addition, the Cook Strait is one of the most expensive pieces of water in the world to cross, so this would need to be a government initiative, underwritten by all of us in taxes. Not a light-weight undertaking.

So what can we do? There appears to be no successive government will to make change, but we can take individual action. We can try to consume less and to tell those around us how they too can make better choices. We need to make things as easy as we can on ourselves, else we won't keep it up. For that, we have to be organised.

OK. 25 ideas for how to get organised:

1. Grow your own veges where possible. Start small. Repeat what grows well. Save your seed.
2. Bottle or freeze excess production for the off-season.
3. Buy veges and fruit in season.
   
4. Buy direct from the producer where possible.
5. Buy in bulk, taking your own containers (don't forget to tare off the scales at the shop).
6. Don't buy individual small packets in a big bag, even when they are cheaper. Buy a large bag and collect small containers to put single serves into.
7. Carry mesh bags and cloth shopping bags everywhere you go (I have a set in each car - yes we are a two car family - and two in my handbag).
8. Try to buy genuinely recyclable materials: cotton, wool, glass, steel, paper.
9. Get a soda stream if you like fizzy drink.
10. Make your own yoghurt (so, so easy!).
11. Fill your own beer or cider from a craft brewer in recyclable containers.
12. Buy milk direct from a local farmer. Use your own glass bottles.
13. Don't use clingfilm. Get some of the silicone stretch covers instead.
14. Avoid plastic where possible. Leave plastic behind at the shop (so they have the cost of dealing with it ...which may make them change suppliers - or at least feedback to them that the customer opinion tide is turning).
15. Lobby for glass bottle deposits whenever you can.
16. Read the newspaper with an online subscription.
17. Get all your bills emailed.
18. Get a "no junk mail" sign on your letterbox.
19. Buy coffee beans in bulk from a local roaster. Don't use coffee pods.
20. When you are tempted to buy something new, postpone the purchase for one week. Often we have gone off the idea.
21. Get an old sewing machine. Mend or retrim clothes rather than buy new ones.
22. Swap clothes with a friend.
23. Buy second-hand. Op-shop.
24. Repair appliances rather than buy new ones, even if it is more expensive.
25. Repurpose, gift, swap, give away, donate things you no longer use.

Trust me, doing this will not turn us into hairy toed hippies. It should make us aware of just how much crap we each unthinkingly generate each year, though.

If we can each make change, a step - or 25 - at a time, we can make New Zealand pure again.


Sam

References:

• Viktorius, M. (23 April 2018). The Myth of Pure New Zealand. Retrieved from http://www.maruf-hops-maps.com/en/myth-pure-new-zealand/
• Newshub (24 April 2018). 'I feel cheated': US backpacker says NZ's 'clean, green' image is a myth. Retrieved from http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2018/04/i-feel-cheated-us-backpacker-says-nz-s-clean-green-image-is-a-myth.html

read more "New Zealand: 100% waste"

The Gap Between Promise and Action

A friend of mine recently created lovely neat channels on the door to the family pantry to hold Nespresso pods. While the work was fabulous, I was saddened by the implied waste. Nespresso pods are one of the most costly ways to consume coffee, and - despite my friends protesting that the pods are recycled - I am suspicious about how much recycling actually happens, despite Nestlé's green claims.

Recycling pods provides two choices: we either take the pods to a drop-off centre and the people at the centre clean the coffee out and send the aluminium for recycling; or that we clean the pods out ourselves and put the cleaned pods in with the aluminium cans with our local recycling scheme. Many people don't do either, and just chuck them out with their rubbish.

The aluminium consumed in every pod can't be turned into anything else down in our neck of the world... and people seem to drink four or five pods-worth of coffee a day. That's 1300 or 1600 pods per consumer, per year! Staggering. The website, One Million Women, state that globally 55 million pods are used per day ...and suggest that few are fully recycled (14 April 2007). Nestlé says that pods are recyclable, and their PR video looks all well and good (here), but the video script carefully doesn't say that the pods actually get recycled in New Zealand. This omission is all it takes to allow a difference between the possibility of recycling and the act of actually doing so.

Most of our 'recycling' in New Zealand, once collected, is simply landfilled because our overall quantities are too small to do anything with, and the cost of collecting it into a large enough cluster to then ship it offshore is prohibitive. China used to take a lot of our plastic, but no longer does: they have put restrictions in place as to what can be imported. To the best of my knowledge, the only thing that is consistently recycled is glass (often used for base-course - after being broken up and rumbled - on our roads). Some paper gets reused for things like egg cartons, but a lot is not suitable for reuse with our level of manufacturing and - again - logistics and cost. About half of our aluminium is intended for recycling: but it cannot be done in this country. As far as I am aware, there is no re-smelting plant in New Zealand for any type of aluminium: so aluminium intended for recycling - mostly industrial and commercial product - is shredded and goes to Australia or Japan if the cost:benefit stacks up.

From student projects undertaken into waste management which I have supervised, I know our local collection centres landfill almost everything other than glass and some paper. However, our councils wisely keep us in the habit of recycling so that when there is finally a buyer for the waste we produce, the systems are already in place, so supply will be seamless.

However, with Nespresso pods, I smell 'PR'. I suspect that pods don't get fully recycled in New Zealand. You can buy bags to post your pods back, or you can drop your spent pods off at selected florists. The coffee MAY get emptied out at the florists', but then the pods would have to be fully cleaned and the put in their recycling. Will all pod drop-off florists' put the aluminium in their recycle bin? Will their council have access to aluminium recycling collection points? Not in the South Island: apparently the Cook Strait is the most expensive piece of water in the world to cross. I would imagine that most aluminium goes to storage to wait better economic times, or to straight to landfill if the collection points are strained.

We don't manufacture Nespresso pods in New Zealand, and the cost of return shipping would outweigh any possible benefit: even if the pod aluminium goes to Australia. The logistics and costs of getting all those pods into one place in New Zealand to then ship them to Australia would be much greater than any actual value of recycling, and I cannot imagine that a company with Nestlé's - lack of - reputation for green practices would willingly take on the cost.

As a result, I suspect green-washing and consumer PR on the part of Nestlé. A gap between promise and action.

The best recycling is one that we don't need in the first place. There is even a name for this now: pre-cycling. This is a bit like a Clayton's (here) for any of you who remember watching the TV ads when you were a short person: "the drink you are having when you aren't having a drink" could become the "the consumption you are having when you aren't consuming".

Rather than a pod machine, think instead about buying one where you grind your own beans, and only heat enough hot water for the coffee head itself. That is what our machine does (it's an Ascaso), which has been going now for thirteen years with a few minor repairs. However, if you really want to go green, apparently instant coffee has the lightest footprint - ugh! But that is a step too far for me.


Sam

References:

• Gunther, M. (27 May 2015). The good, the bad and the ugly: sustainability at Nespresso. Retrieved 7 February 2018 from https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/may/27/nespresso-sustainability-transparency-recycling-coffee-pods-values-aluminum
• Nespresso NZ (n.d.). How to Recycle Coffee Capsules. Retrieved 7 February 2018 from https://www.nespresso.com/nz/en/how-to-recycle-coffee-capsules
• One Million Women (14 April 2017). Recycling Your Coffee Pods: Is The Nespresso Recycling Scheme Working? Retrieved 7 February 2018 from https://www.1millionwomen.com.au/blog/recycling-your-coffee-pods-nespresso-recycling-scheme-working/
• Wikipedia (n.d.) Clayton's. Retrieved 8 February 2018 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claytons

read more "The Gap Between Promise and Action"

Reducing waste

Recently I have been reading the book, "The Year of Living Danishly", about a London couple in their 30s who get the opportunity to move to rural Denmark for a year, and how their life together changes as a result (I should add that I borrowed this as an ebook from the local library).

It is a very interesting book, in that it provides a real insight into exactly how living is done differently, and in particular, the Danish approach to waste, design and longevity. I am not trying to say that the Danes are perfect - those who appear in the book seem to drink too much alcohol and consume too many sugary pastries for my taste - but as a nation Denmark seems to focus on modifying behaviours to limit the effects of the consumer society.

On the same day that my reading was drawing to its conclusion, I ran across a post in the regional paper about a New Zealand couple who were doing a road trip of the country explaining in simple steps how to work towards getting rid of your rubbish bin. Called "The Rubbish Trip presents Reducing our Household Rubbish: The Zero Waste Approach", the seminars aim to provide tips that attendees can pick and apply to fit their lives (website here). The idea is that those small changes will add up to larger changes in behaviour, and that over time, we become more thoughtful and make better choices.

But what surprised me the most were some of the readers' comments on the site. One poster asked "Will they tell us the downside too?" I was left wondering about this 'downside'.

In working to get rid of our rubbish bins, I could only see positive aspects, such as in reducing toxicity to both ourselves and our environment, lowering our collective carbon footprint, teaching our children to not buy into the throw-away society, retraining our local - and eventually national and international - providers, reducing our costs at the supermarket, and preventing more landfill... I couldn't see a downside.

When I mention toxicity, I have worked with career clients who have had to transition due to toxic overload syndrome: an illness which seems to often strike people in the health sector. We like to think that our cleaners and disinfectants can only do good for us, but that is not so. There are people amongst us who will have a allergic reaction to perfume, scented soap or even scented deodorant. Because of working with sufferers in the career sector, I no longer wear perfume, make-up, or use scented deodorant. I do use a very lightly scented soap and shampoo, but if I was seeing such a client, would have to shower again before seeing them to rinse even such lightly scented items away. As a nation, we simply don't understand the damage exposure can do, nor do we realise how little it might take to push each of us into overload.

I haven't been able to do away with my bin yet, or to yet consider it. I know I could bulk buy more to reduce the use of some soft plastics, and would be interested to see what else we could do, providing I make the moves one step at a time, and keep it a lifestyle choice, not a route-march. We currently use a soda stream for fizzy water, very rarely buy fizzy drinks, fill our own milk bottles from Oaklands (we are lucky where we live, as a local company, Oaklands, have vending machines for A2 milk, where we can refill our own glass bottles), compost, cook vege scraps for our dogs, use our own cloth and mesh bags to avoid plastic shopping bags. We go to a local fruit and vege shop and try to avoid buying veg in plastic. We get very little paper rubbish as all our bills and news arrive electronically, and we have no letterbox, but a PO Box with a "No Junk Mail" order. Any paper we do get is stockpiled to start the fire in winter. We keep any glass jars to put our own homemade jam into. We bottle our own fruit, and make our own apple juice from our own trees. We have a vege garden.

Despite all this, we still manage to have a full recycle bin every two to three months, and have a drum of other waste probably twice a year because our shopping habits are still fairly normal. We drink wine... and I have not yet found a way to easily bulk buy bubbly!

But I am still cannot see the downside in lowering our waste. I would be interested if any of you can find it for me.


Sam

References:

• Gee, S. (14 January 2018). Kiwi couple share benefits of life without a rubbish bin. Retrieved 15 January 2017 from https://www.stuff.co.nz/nelson-mail/news/100490682/kiwi-couple-share-benefits-of-life-without-a-rubbish-bin
• The Rubbish Trip (n.d.). Upcoming Events. Retrieved 15 January 2017 from http://therubbishtrip.co.nz/upcoming-events/

read more "Reducing waste"

Newsletter Issue 136, August 2007

Sam Young Newsletter

Issue 136, August 2007

Hi guys,

Read about Europe, the UK and Japan's drive for Life Story Labelling.

Having trouble finding what you want on Google and Yahoo? Then check out Boolean Search Syntax below. 

'Greenwashing' Facts   TLAs for SMEs        Tips, Short & Hot Keys        Hot Linx

Don't forget, if you want to be taken off my mailing list, click here to send me a reply e-mail and I will remove your name.

Life Story Labelling

Consumers, governments and business leaders seem to be acting on mounting pressure to confront excessive consumption, pollution, national carbon footprints, air miles, environmental costs and to uphold the Kyoto protocol.

Carbon footprinting is becoming a household term in first world consumer societies. Consumers' are wanting to find out about the origins of a product before they buy, particularly in Europe. Questions no one ever asked a few years ago look like becoming an important facet of the purchasing decision. Consumers now want to know how the product was made, who by, how did it get to its point of sale and what environmental effects it may have after purchasing or on disposal.

At a recent seafood conference in Belgium, the annual Brussels European Seafood Exhibition (ESE), focus was on sustainability, driven by two different groups; environmental lobby groups and the retail trade.

Retailers are demanding the ability to clearly state to their customers that the seafood they are selling is from a certified sustainable source, with some retail buyers now refusing to purchase non-certified product for their retail chains. Wild fish must carry Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) Certification. There is strong demand from UK retailers for farmed fish to also obtain certification, which is currently outside the MSC's mandate. Those countries whose aquaculture farmers are proactive in either persuading the MSC to broaden their scope or who set up independent certification will have the inside track to key European retail buyers.

So, if printed net weights, use by dates, nutritional breakdowns and content labelling wasn't enough, now most UK retail chains are looking at how they can clearly show customers the production history of goods. Some brands are already experimenting with attaching ‘life story labels' to their products, satisfying consumers who are ready to spend their dosh on what appears to do the least harm.

UK supermarket Tesco plans to introduce carbon footprint labels on all 70,000 products it sells to allow shoppers to compare carbon impacts. Implementation will take a while: the company is currently investigating how to develop a “universally accepted and commonly understood” measuring system.

Increasingly, this requirement for a carbon footprint measure is likely to pit internationally produced goods against local production. Good for local producers as local manufacture may cost less in carbon footprint terms than international production due to clocking up fewer air miles.

However, if you are a Tesco's shopper, will you be able to fairly compare the footprint of outdoors grown Spanish tomatoes to that of British grown diesel-fueled hot-house tomatoes? The agricultural and horticultural lobby in the UK is very, very strong, and would have consumers believe that local is better for the planet. Yet when if you look at all the real impacts, clearly it is not.

It will all come down to how fairly and honestly the measures are. I am sure that getting the mix right will be a long and complicated process, adding more cost to manufacture, and providing we consumers with even more choice.

 

Boolean Search Syntax

While all of us have used Google and Yahoo, not all of us use the best search refinements.

But by using some very easy search syntax, you can create far more powerful searches to help you quickly find exactly what you're looking for.

Entering specific syntax manually into your search query is often much faster than using Google and Yahoo's advanced searching capability. Following are several things you can do to get far better search results:

1. Encapsulating keywords. To find pages with an exact phrase, enclose the phrase in quotation marks, eg "Kilroy was here"
2. Include / exclude keywords. Search engines normally omit 'noise words' from queries, such as how, where and I. To include them, put a plus sign immediately in front of them (eg +there). To exclude anything that you don't want, put a minus immediately in front (eg -where)
3. At this point, your query string would look like this: "Kilroy was here" +there -where
4. Site-specific search. To limit your search to a specific site, all you need to do is add the site tag to your query string with a full colon, eg "Where's Wally" site:whereswally.com
5. URL-specific search. Inurl lets you find pages whose URLs contain specific strings of text. This is very useful if you can't remember the entire URL, just part of the URL or the page URL. eg "Where's Wally" inurl:findme

With those tips, you'll get better search results while bypassing loads of useless pages. You can combine any or all of the syntax above to build more complex search queries. But, although these tips work with both Google and Yahoo, they do not work with MSN Live Search. For some reason, Microsoft chose not to implement these options in its new search engine.

Have fun!

'Greenwashing' Facts

Research company Nick Jones & Associates from Auckland have published a few summary facts based on AC Nielsen data from the second-half of 2006, as follows:

Some key facts to consider from the latest “Consumer who Cares” research (Please note that all information is based on all people 10 years and over sourced from Nielsen Media Research Panorama January to June 2006/Nick Jones & Associates Ltd)

• 1.68 million people have bought a product or service from a company, because it supports a charity or worthy cause
• 1.52 million people agree that when buying a product or service from a particular company, it is very important to them that the company shows a high level of social and/or environmental responsibility
• 1.35 million people who have bought a product or service from a company because it supports a charity or worthy cause, even though they are slightly more expensive
• 1.14 million have purposefully avoided buying a product or service from a specific company, because of concerns about its impact on society or the environment.

Interesting, isn't it? So even though being greener and more community-focused is becoming quite media-trendy, it looks like it is not merely rhetoric. We are apparently walking the talk.

TLAs for SMEs

Here are this newsletter's TLAs for you:

• DDR, Double Data Rate of usually SDRAM, at double the clock speed of earlier RAM formats.
• SSD, Solid State Disk. This is a new flash-type of electronic memory that is tipped to take over the mechanical HDDs we currently use in our PCs and laptops

Please feel free to email me with any TLAs that you want to get the bottom (meaning!) of.

Tips, Short+Hot Keys

In this newsletter, we look at some handy ways of changing font size:

• PowerPoint, Publisher, Word "Decrease the font size" Ctrl & Shift & < (Less Than)
• PowerPoint, Publisher, Word "Increase the font size" Ctrl & Shift & > (Greater Than)
• Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, Word "Decrease font size of selected text by 1 point" Ctrl & [ (Open Square Bracket)
• Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, Word "Increase font size of selected text by 1 point" Ctrl & ] (Close Square Bracket)
• Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, Publisher, Word "Select the toolbar Font Size field" Ctrl & Shift & P
• Word "Shrink Font" Ctrl & Shift & , (comma)
• Word "Grow Font" Ctrl & Shift & . (full stop)

Hot Linx

As mentioned in the "Greenwashing" Facts article, you can get research in New Zealand about customers who care, at Nick Jones' website, http://www.njassociates.co.nz/

Tesco's supermarket in the UK walk the talk about carbon emissions. You can check out their carbon footprint report card at http://www.tesco.com/climatechange/carbonFootprint.asp

Download the latest OED Communications Outlook Report (NB: Read Only) from the OECD website at http://213.253.134.43/oecd/pdfs/browseit/9307021E.PDF

Tempted to buy a Tony Robbins book? Then read one Miami Herald journalist's view of his seminars at http://web.archive.org/web/20021203130105/http:/www.lynxfeather.net/nest/humor/2002/alteredstates.html

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                                Catch you again soon!! E-mail your suggestions to me here

read more "Newsletter Issue 136, August 2007"