Post #6: Compost. My Own Little Landfill, Part I

July 11, 2008

This summer I finally learned how to make compost.  Sort of.

I had been procrastinating for 30 or 40 years.

Composting,  a remote mystery to me, had always been on my want-to-do list.  In theory, I aspired to compost—to convert yard-trash into plant food and mulch.  I wanted to spare the waste stream from more synthetic fertilizers and pesticides—and spare the town landfill, a bit.

Yet in practice, I suspected that composting was trouble and hard work.  I had seen folks laboring over their compost piles with pitchforks.  (And my back has a ruptured disc.)  Besides, didn’t compost piles bring rats and raccoons and bad smells?  I had heard of one person whose compost pile caught fire.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I set to work—at my computer keyboard.  I spent days consulting Internet tales from veteran composters.

Then I made my plan, a time-tested consumer plan:  First, make purchase.  Second, follow directions.  I took the easy way out.  I bought a compost tumbler through the mail.

It’s an enormous cylinder, 40 inches in diameter and 50 inches long.  It has 2 chambers that hold 9 bushels each.  Propped on its steel frame, it’s taller than I am.  It’s a moose.   But it has gears!  Without busting my back, I can rotate the barrel by its handle, to aerate the contents.

The directions said to put in 4 parts of green yard-trash for every 1 part of brown yard-trash.  With that mix, I was supposed to fill the 9-bushel chamber all at once.

So one fine day, Mr. Reluctant and I stuffed the chamber with 7.2 bushels of green grass clippings from the mower bag and 1.8 bushels of mulched dead leaves.  Four to one.

Then every day for two weeks, I opened the chamber, watered the contents, closed the chamber, and rotated the barrel five times.  In 14 days I had . . . real compost.

OK, OK.  That’s not the whole story.  It wasn’t quite that easy.   More details will appear in my next post on August 11th.

Tips and News from the Blogosphere:

Some prefer to make compost on the ground, like in a 4’ x 4’ compost bin.  Others, like me, use a ground-free barrel or tumbler.  The site http://www.composters.com sells bins and barrels and other helpful equipment.

Many people believe that composting is easy.  This jolly video from the Sierra Club takes the prize for simple fun:  http://youtube.com/watch?v=9PALk7Nux9Y.

Kitchen Gardeners International has a clear, calm explanation of compost ingredients: http://youtube.com/watch?v=aKlauRA7ugI&feature=related.

I found a good three-video series called Home Composting—It’s  Second Nature.  Part I contains basics:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHVpLCQvjQQ&NR=1.  Part II has finer points: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyYuT2v-Iz0&feature=related.  Part III gives troubleshooting advice, numbers to call, and further websites: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO2zYtvKPBc&feature=related.

These websites give different advice about the ratio of “green” to “brown” yard-trash.  But don’t worry.  ☺  In composting, there’s room to experiment—in fact, to get comfortable with experimentation.

Beginning to Compost—Stumbles and Snags:

Were my actions an environmental plus, or a minus?  The tumbler was tubular steel and galvanized metal—recyclable: http://youtube.com/watch?v=xl7xjj92rA4.  Yet think of all the packaging and truck exhaust needed to ship it to me from Pennsylvania!  So the more I composted, the better.

We had not yet begun to compost, when we hit our first snag.

The compost tumbler came Assembly Required. One instruction said to “snap apart” a piece of tack-welded metal.  What?  Mr. Reluctant and I both held back.  Happily, our daughter’s fiancé, a machinist, explained that the metal was not tack-welded but incompletely laser-cut.  He snapped it apart, himself.  Thanks, Brian!

The same day we set up our compost tumbler, the four kids next door ran to their parents.  “Mommy, Daddy, what is that in our neighbors’ yard?  It’s so big!  Is it a bomb?”

After unloading my first batch of compost, I washed the inside of the tumbler with the hose.  I stuck my head and torso far into the drum.  The ricocheting jet-stream of water soaked me to the skin.  Bits of compost were hanging from my hair.  I didn’t care.  Compost is good-clean-dirt.

Post #5: Those Trees in Our Mailboxes

June 11, 2008

My aunt Emily was a sweet-tempered librarian who lived to be 94. In Emily’s last few years, her mail came to my address so that I could help with her paperwork.

That’s when I began receiving Emily’s American Library Association Journal in my mailbox. It has arrived every month since then, through Emily’s death in 1999 and up to the present. Emily had a lifetime subscription that has expanded into her afterlife.

At times I’ve pushed back. I’ve written “Deceased, thanks anyway” on postage-paid return enclosures. I’ve reached voice mail on the ALA phone queue, but no responsive voice. I couldn’t find a “cancel subscription” clickable on their website, so I punched “Contact Us” and emailed them the longstanding news that Emily has passed away.

Two weeks after that email, the ALA Journal arrived in my mailbox again.

Paper mail. That’s just how most people do business in this country. Business means advertising, and advertising usually means more paper in the mailbox.

And paper means trees. We grind up 100 million trees a year into paper advertisements for our mailboxes—our cost of doing business, until we find a better way. These trees become our 4.5 million tons a year of junk mail.

Estimates run from 41.5 to 53 pounds per person, per year, of junk mail—ground trees—in our mailboxes. We get coupons, credit cards, insurance offers, land deals, catalogs for clothes, books, furniture, food, plants, gas grills—all begging us to buy stuff that will of course be delivered to our mailboxes in paper or cardboard packaging made from trees.

Mr. Reluctant Environmentalist likes to say, “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?”

News and Tips from the Blogosphere:

Well, I can’t stop companies from advertising. But maybe I can spare some trees the fate of being ground and stuffed into my own mailbox.

Our house is worse than average. Every week, we receive 10-12 pounds of ground-to-pulp trees as mailed advertisements. Could I bring that number down? Lighten a few landfills by just that much?

Here are some anti-junk-mail online services I could try. The first four sites are FREE:

Native Forest Network. They explain OptOut to screen credit card and insurance offers, Direct Marketing to stop ads, and phone numbers to stop sweepstakes mail: http://www.nativeforest.org/stop_junk_mail/nfn_junk_mail_guide.htm.

To escape commercial mailings, I’d try
https://www.directmail.com/directory/mail_preference/.

To fend off unwanted catalogs, http://www.catalogchoice.org/.

[Businesses can stop mail for former employees at
http://www.ecologicalmail.org/.]

If all this is too much work for me, I can pay a service to contact other services:

One service, 41pounds.org, will stop my junk mail and donate their fee to environmental groups. Here’s a video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKZQUUXwFoY&feature=related.

For $14, the service greendimes will remove me from all mailing lists and plant a tree: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7zsUmwPzTI&feature=related.

Ellen DeGeneres likes greendimes. On this video her audience gets a greendimes membership and free Simple shoes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf-_OuCK_HI&feature=related.

Stumbles Ahead? Talking to Myself

My Question: But I like my Coldwater Creek and Lands End catalogues. What if my environmental efforts cut me off from them?

My Answer: Coldwater Creek and Lands End have websites. With pictures. A digital, paperless world beckons. (Oops, they do ship in cardboard boxes. I’ll recycle!)

My Question: What if I try all these ways to stop my junk mail and it doesn’t stop? What if I still have pounds and pounds of ground trees in my mailbox?

My Answer: I’ll try, try again. I’ll report all failures and successes in this blog.

Comments welcome! Write in and share what has worked for you, and what hasn’t!

Post #4: Our Greening Community

April 26, 2008

Yeah, we know. Our national leaders don’t give us much help in Going Green, and we’re waiting for that situation to change.

Some cities and states are taking action. Banning plastic water bottles in the town of Fairfield (and on campus) could help. Might it be educational for someone’s class in Fall 08 to take on that challenge?

Capital investment and corporate clout do count—as in the funding for our Combined Heat and Power plant. On March 26th at Green Energy Night, Dolan School of Business, we heard of great opportunities for new careers in clean energy.

Mainly, though, we can consolidate our own efforts right here at Fairfield University.

Think globally, act locally . . . and act in communication with other locals.

In your comments, you’ve shared good tips with everyone who reads these posts. I’m hoping other bloggers will join our conversations as I cite and write to them, throwing out lines.

Here’s a list of some who are helping Fairfield University go greener. Did you know . . . ?

In the Works: New Jesuit Residence. Groundbreaking on 4/17/08, behind Bellarmine Lawn. Designed by Gray Organschi Architecture of New Haven. Bamboo floors and recycled contents from structural steel to carpets. Green “living” roof, with grass and wildflowers, to help insulate building and protect roofing membrane from ultraviolet light, will absorb rainwater and capture run-off. Geothermal heating and cooling system. Total project cost: $10.5 million.

New Grant: Food Composting Project for Barone Campus Center. Brainchild of co-directors Prof. James Biardi (Biology) and James Fitzpatrick, Assistant VP for Student Affairs. $35,000 grant. Small sealed-vessel composting unit purchased from Acme Industries in Texas. Virtually all food waste from BCC collected daily, weighed and composted twice a week in a 72-hour cycle. High-grade compost, pasteurized and oxygenated, produced for use by campus operations, with excess sold to the community. Students will learn the science and economy of recapturing nutrients from the waste steam. Demonstration Garden will be near Barone Campus Center.

Recent Launch: Combined Heat and Power Plant. New CHP unveiled last fall. High-efficiency turbines operated by natural gas can produce most electricity for the campus, taking us off the grid. Excess heat captured and distributed through underground hot-water pipelines to heat campus buildings. Cost: $9.5 million, funded by institutions and a $2.3 million grant from the State of Connecticut.

Change-a-Light Campaign. Ongoing effort, begun last fall, by our Student Environmental Association and United Illuminating. Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs, or CFLs, use 75% less energy and last 10 times longer. You’ve seen them. They’re those spiral-shaped light bulbs.

Campus Recycling. Joe Bouchard, our Environmental Compliance Coordinator, is in charge of disposal contracts and managing the ADS recycling trucks. Paper, plastic, glass, commingles, newspapers, batteries, small electronic items.
Look for recycling bins around campus.

Townhouse Block 10. This townhouse has a solar roof, which is the project of Evangelos Hadjimichael, Dean of the School of Engineering.

Earth House. Next fall a group of students, including Alexandra Gross, will practice sustainable green living. Alexandra Gross, next year’s Editor-in-Chief of The Mirror, writes smart articles on the environment. Go online to The Mirror, search her name, and receive a lively crash course on green issues.

Green Campus Initiative. A student-led, independent sustainability project with the goal of centralizing green initiatives around campus while sponsoring campus student research. This project aims to help Fairfield U. rethink, reevaluate, revise, and redefine its understanding of sustainable efficiency. The GCI is a network of students, faculty, staff and administration working together to research, plan, and initiate green projects on campus. The network is always growing, so email Galen at galen.vinter@gmail.com to discuss how you can join the initiative! Visit them at www.freewebs.com/sustainfairfieldu

Student Environmental Association (SEA). They’re behind the Change-a-Light campaign, the annual Beach and Campus cleanups, and Sneaker Mountain—collecting sneakers or rubber sandals for recycling into playground material by Nike Reuse-a-shoe. President: Stacy Davis.

Double-Sided Printers in the Library. Introduced by Christina McGowan and others last fall. Students are pleased; paper and toner use is reduced. Computer and Network Services is installing duplex printing this fall in the 24-hour lab (Lab 250), with more locations to come.

Green Videos. Frank Romano, producer of “Let’s Be Frank” on the Ham Channel, works with students to film green events here, such as “Leaf Pickup,” which can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76D9-vd-jVU

Environmental Steering Committee. A group of faculty, staff, administration, and students who practice environmental stewardship and collaborate to move the green agenda forward. They revisit past projects, look at current issues, take on new ideas, and work with administrators on project funding and cost savings. Contact: Dina Franceschi.

Red to Green Online Community. The Red to Green site was recently re-designed by Lisa Roberts, Web Communications Editor, to make room for an online community - us. Through the collaborative efforts of Web Communications, the Media Center, CNS, and Printing & Graphics, three opportunities have been added for our continuing online conversation:

(1) The Reluctant Environmentalist. Post comments, early and often.

(2) Green Profiles at http://www.fairfield.edu/green_profiles.html. Visit, offer your own profile, and spread the word.

(3) Tip of the Week at http://www.fairfield.edu/greenmovement.html. Send your own tip!

Now it’s the last week of April. Exams are upon us. We must say goodbye for a while.

The Reluctant Environmentalist will blog lite during the summer and return for regular postings in the fall. Topics: the recycling blues, paperless classrooms, gray water, catalogue deterrents, composting big and small, seeking out local produce—whatever lights up the blogosphere. Request a topic!

Post #3: Water, Water Everywhere

April 24, 2008

Water is the healthiest drink around. Eight full glasses of water a day are best, they say.  No sodas or diet sodas—sugar, phosphates, caffeine.  A plain glass of water, instead!

The thing is, water doesn’t often come in glasses now.  We have the plastic water bottle.

And mind-boggling statistics: To make 28 million plastic water bottles a year (with the resulting tons of landfill), we use 1.5 million barrels of oil and emit a billion pounds of carbon dioxide: http://www.netnewspublisher.com/water-bottle-environment/.

I’d like to sing this to the plastic water bottle, using that old “breakup” tune:

Got along without ya
Before I met ya.
Gonna get along without ya now!

Can I, though? I drink water from plastic bottles. I meet rows of them every day. They stare at me from the on-campus and in-town spots where I eat lunch, boasting their mountain-spring-fed, supposedly pure water. Don’t I want to be healthy?

And don’t I want to be polite? At lunch workshops on our campus, soft drinks and bottled water are the drink menu. I’ve considered going into the ladies’ room to slurp water from the faucet after eating my sandwich wrap. Would that be rude?

Which brings up water fountains. I associate water fountains with fifth-grade boys in (my) elementary school who spat into them or mashed chewed gum over the spout. How’s the germ level in today’s fountains?

But I digress to the land of paranoia. I’m betting we can fundamentally Trust the Tap, despite that flare-up about prescription drugs in the water. Filters reassure us even more.

Maybe I could tote around a little pottery cup in my pocket.  Then if lunch counters (and Sodexo) would place pitchers of iced tap water on tables, I’d be all set.  Would anybody else?

News and Tips from the Blogosphere:

Some say bottled water, not tap water, holds the dangers.  Plastic dangers. Some say if you buy bottled water, don’t re-use the plastic bottle, period.  And don’t buy bottled water with a 3, 6, or 7 inside the little plastic “recycling triangle.” These points and others are on this video: http://tinyurl.com/45swcf.

People are especially suspicious of Bisphenol-A (BPA) in many plastics. After a recent study, Naglene has stopped making its refillable water (and baby!) bottles because of BPA. The NYTimes tells us what happened to the rats: http://tinyurl.com/55bbdj.

On the web, refillable water bottles are much debated. One blog plays with the idea that plastic water bottles are among the things white people like: http://tinyurl.com/4mys27. Tongue-in-cheek, they recommend Sigg aluminum refillable bottles because they’re “cutting edge” trendy. Use lined aluminum or stainless steel, says www.idealbite.com.

Seattle has banned bottled water: http://tinyurl.com/29g6zs.  The city won’t buy it now.  San Francisco and Ann Arbor have banned it, too.  Chicago taxes it. Any ideas here?

Planning a Fumble:

Sometimes I buy my lunch sandwich at a drive-through.  My bad, yes, it’s on my Reluctant To-Do List.  Their ice water comes in a huge paper cup.  I re-use the cup.

So next time, I could hand them my used paper cup to put my ice water in.  Too odd?  Well, a good laugh about the crazy lady with her paper cup could brighten their day.

Post #2: Lugging Groceries Home

April 22. 2008

I’m still fleeing the plastic bags that lurk behind small store counters—drugstores, convenience marts, bookstores. With a few months of practice, I might escape.

Yet no sooner had I cornered that one do-able thing, than a larger problem loomed. Grocery shopping—that’s the Mother of All Plastic Bags.

While I watched from the supermarket parking lot, customers trotted out with their arms drooping and swaying, several plastic bag-handles hooked on each finger. Hundreds of crinkly bags were hitching a ride to the landfill. Every 10 minutes.

Those pale orange plastic bags are ugly but seductive. Hefting paper bags takes more brawn and balance—and makes me drop my car keys. But watching all that plastic march out of the supermarket, I did re-think the hefting option.

Then I got wiser – paper bags are bad, too. See http://www.smellslikegreenspirit.com/paper-or-plastic/. Making them takes more energy and makes more pollution, plus they don’t rot much in landfills. (Here jsimon’s comment is spot on.) We turn 14 million trees per year into paper bags. Why?

Moving food from the grocery shelf to my pantry was an ethical morass. Just to eat, I had to climb into my little car, spew out hydrocarbons for three miles to the grocery and three miles back, only to fling more bad bags—plastic or paper—into landfills.

Tips and News from the Blogosphere:

I was stumped. Could I just stack my shopping cart with re-usable cardboard boxes to toss groceries in?

Then my son Tim told me canvas bags were on sale at Whole Foods for $15 each, labeled “I’m not a Plastic bag.” How stylish and $$$$. But would they rot well?

I googled canvas bags and found a “life cycle chart” of paper, plastic, and canvas bags: http://nonurdles.com/?p=119. No info on rotting, but in the left corner PP fiber bags were listed as best.

PP turned out to be polypropylene, for 100% recyclable bags: http://tinyurl.com/4bg9ow. Here was an answer! Where were they hiding these bags?

Oh. Guess what. Stop & Shop sells bright green PP bags for $1 each. Hiding in plain sight from my (not) super-keen eye. Light, airy. Later my husband, Mr. Reluctant, found bigger, roomier, just-as-light PP bags at Staples, for $1.25 each.

An especially great solution comes from Eddie Rivera, Contract Administrator for custodial services here at Fairfield University. For Campus and Beach Clean-ups during Earth Week, he discovered huge trash bags ingeniously programmed to rot 55 days after use! They’re on this website: http://www.epi-global.com. Check it out.

Stumble of the Month:

In a Florida supermarket, I caught myself loading six items into two plastic bags. Whoa. I (proudly) unloaded the six items, stacked them in my arms, and hung the bags back onto their hooks.

The clerk looked at me strangely. Ah, I thought, they don’t know about plastic bags yet in Florida. Then I saw the sign outside: Recycle Your Plastic Bags Here.

Startup: Fleeing Plastic Bags

April 20, 2008

It’s not easy going green. For years I’ve been dragging my feet. There’s an ocean of advice out there about being environmentally conscious. Help! What to choose, where to start? I thought I’d wait for someone to write a Nice, Short How-To.

Then one day I read an article about little plastic bags—the ones stores give customers, to carry stuff home.

Oh, dear. The article said our country uses millions of barrels of oil a year to make 100 billion plastic bags. Most end up in landfills, where they sit and refuse to biodegrade. (That is, rot – they refuse to rot. Little secret: Rotting is good. Keeps nature going.)

So I thought, I’ll start here. Long journey begins with first step. I’ll steer clear of little plastic bags.

The next day I go to the drugstore. I buy Tylenol and a Chinese New Year card for my nephew. The clerk blows on her nail polish and says, “Wanna bag?”

Aha. No, I tell her, I don’t wanna bag. I see them hanging beside the counter, hundreds jammed onto a metal hook.

But the rain begins to fall harder. My pockets are full of credit cards and sore throat lozenges. Maybe I should just take the bag? Can’t my teeny mission wait till tomorrow?

Nope, it can’t. I stick the Tylenol box and the crisp white Chinese New Year card inside my winter coat and slip them down my long padded waterproof sleeve. They’re snug, held in my tight cuff.

At home I extract the crisp-no-more white card from my sleeve. It’s damp, with gummy edges. OK. My nephew will enjoy teasing me.

I open the Tylenol and recall that video, “The Story of Stuff” that Lisa Roberts, Web editor at Fairfield University, showed me: http://www.storyofstuff.com. Are we all robots carrying Stuff from store to landfill? Yes, I resisted a plastic bag—but here I am holding a Tylenol box and a plastic bottle, headed for landfill. Hmmm.

Not too victorious, am I?

At this moment I decide to record my reluctant environmental journey. I’m new—green—at living green, but I can at least leave a blog trail. Folks coming late to environmentalism, like me, may be comforted by my setbacks and fumbles. Plus I’ll do my homework, picking up tips and blogsites along the way.

News and Tips from the blogosphere, where the world is at war against plastic bags:

In Sonoma County, CA, they’re on the point of banning plastic bags. San Francisco has outlawed them. Go to http://nonurdles.com/?cat=11. A “nurdle” is a “prefabricated plastic resin micro-pellet,” namely plastic-bag detritus in the ocean.

In Britain, The Daily Mail launched a “Banish the Bag” campaign. China will ban plastic bags this coming June. In Canada, they’ll collect your plastic bags at the curbside. See this and more on http://earth911.org/blog/2008/03/03/ban-the-plastic-bag-campaign-takes-uk-by-storm/

EnviroWoman, in her second year of living plastic free, advises against plastic-bagging your produce on the way to checkout. See http://plasticfree.blogspot.com/2008/01/top-10-tips-to-reduce-plastic-tip-2.html

In Ireland, when they began to charge 33 cents per plastic bag, use dropped by 94 percent. Here’s a good blog: http://projectpowerplant.com/blog/?p=338.

Fumbles and Stumbles:

So I swore off plastic bags, and they began to chase me down.

I spotted a plastic bag hanging from my arm as I left the bookstore. How did that get there? I had been giving the clerk my email address. . . . Zap. Lose focus for a second, and the plastic bag hops onto you for a ride to the landfill.

Yesterday I went to the dentist. Back in my car, with my teeth newly scrubbed, I saw what had crept in beside me: a coral pink plastic bag, holding fluoride toothpaste. It told me, “Enhance Your Smile.”

A better person might have re-ascended the stairs and returned the slightly-used pink bag to the nice secretaries.

At the airport, we bought two small Subway sandwiches for our flight, wrapped in loose paper. Did we want the sandwiches in a plastic bag? “No!” I burst out, as my companion cried, “Yes!” What to say?

You learn by going where you have to go. Oh all right, I cribbed that phrase. It’s from a poem, “The Waking,” by Theodore Roethke. He was waking up to plastic bags. Must have been.

–Mariann Regan
The Reluctant Environmentalist

Jump in and comment! This is for both the Fairfield community and the outside-Fairfield community. We’re in the same boat. Let’s dialogue.