No Impact Week: Solar Panels, Bio-Diesel, and Worms

To ring and rally for No Impact Week hosted by the Huffington Post, I'm measuring up my no-impact history with a self-imposed challenge to trump it with flying colors.

Several years ago, I undertook a year-long experiment to minimize my personal waste. At the time, "no impact" wasn't a common sound bite. I simply wanted to see how waste-wise efficient I could be without foregoing all creature comforts and conveniences. The three domains my experiment focused on were: energy, waste, and transportation.

Energy
At the time, I had a home in a verdant valley on the north shore of Maui. I resided next door to my dear friends and yoga-teachers, which meant I could walk to yoga class every morning. Big plus for wellbeing and reducing my transportation footprint. There were, and still are, no power lines down to that valley, a choice reflected by the residents and the county regarding the cost of stringing electric lines around the ancient mango trees therein. Subsequently, all the homes were energy self-sufficient, largely via photovoltaic solar panels. My house was modest and I lived alone at the time so it didn't cost a fortune to install enough panels to run my household without inconvenience. My electric bill was zero and the cost of the solar panels would pay for itself in about 3-1/2 years. I met my water needs with a combination of a well and water catchment. To heat water I used an on-demand propane water heater, which is about as efficient as it gets. The only utility bill I received was for propane (about $200/year). I felt like a champ.

Transportation
Getting to the nearest town, the laid-back surfer town of Paia, was a 25-minute drive. I knew enough of my neighbors to carpool, but as an independent American I admit that cooperative driving has its inconvenient limits. Solution: trade in my car for a diesel, which could run on veggie oil bio-diesel. Not a bad option when it came in the form of a spiffy VW Jetta turbo diesel with a zippy 38 mpg. There's one company on Maui that refines bio-diesel from reclaimed veggie oil and another gas station that sells a blend of bio-diesel and petroleum-diesel. The cost per gallon for bio-diesel was, and still is, less than the cost of petro-gas. Plus, it spewed 70% less emissions and smelled like french fries. Bonus.

Waste
I was keen to tackle my household waste creatively. The two built-in incentives to minimize it: garbage pick-up was posted at the top of our road and recycling on Maui is limited, namely no paper recycling, both of which meant hauling rubbish in my nice clean car. Consequently, I analyzed what type of waste I was generating the most of and how I could reduce it - the beginning of my study and fascination with MSW (Municipal Solid Waste), which I would cover in detail in my last book, Easy Green Living. The two questions I investigated were: where is it coming from and where is it going? I found that the majority of my waste was from food (food scraps and packaging) and paper (mail and office use as I worked from home).

Food-waste was a no-brainer. Solution: compost it. Food-packaging-waste required pro-actively considering products more wisely. As someone whom prefers a largely fresh diet with ample local produce, reducing processed foods housed in excessive packaging was not a big deal. So far in this experiment, my utility bills were about $46 a month (roughly $16 for propane and $30 for bio-diesel), I was feeling fit as a fiddle from walking to yoga class every morning, and I wasn't eating processed food. A pretty good equation.

Paper-waste would take creative thinking because there's simply no paper recycling on Maui. The biggest culprits: incoming mail and printed material. I campaigned to opt out of junk mail such as unsolicited credit card offers and catalogues by registering with the Direct Marketing Association to get off mailing lists and The Consumer Credit Report, though this would take a few months to kick in. Since then, I've discovered a great company called Tonic Mailstoppers (née GreenDimes) who will do this for you for a just $20 a year and plant some trees on your behalf. At the time, e-billing was relatively new, so hard copies of my credit cards, bank statements, and phone records were inevitably arriving via snail mail. Concurrently, around this time I had a terrible dream that someone was rooting through my garbage and absconding sensitive private banking information. When I woke up it dawned on me exactly what I could do with my paper waste (sensitive information included). I would feed it to worms. Yes, worms love to eat paper. After a little research I trucked off to the hardware store in my bio-diesel ride to obtain the goods: 2 each 33-gallon plastic tubs that would fit together and a spigot to drain. That's it. Well, I had to acquire worms, which wasn't hard after Googling where to get them in my neck of the woods. I drilled a few dozen holes in the bottom of one of the tubs for drainage and fit the other with the spigot. The tub with the holes fit nicely into the tub with the spigot, which would catch the drainage that I could siphon off. I made a mixture of soil and compost that the worms would find a happy home in. In went the worms with some shredded paper. In a matter of 2 days, the paper was gone! With daily watering I was able to shred and add all of the paper I produced and the worms would munch it down to nothing. The byproduct of watering the worm-soil mix daily was a rich, amber-colored worm "tea" that I siphoned off with the spigot and used to water the garden and flowers. It didn't smell horrible and made everything grow and bloom as if on steroids. Amazing. My paper waste was reduced to virtually nothing and no one would ever get his or her paws on my private information. I also discovered that feeding worms coffee grounds makes them randy and apt to reproduce quickly. Soon, I had enough worms to start a second bin and then more worms than I knew what to do with. So, I started giving them away and introducing them to the garden. Subsequently, I produced just one small plastic bag of rubbish every 2 weeks. Thank you worms.

So there you have it. Solar panels, bio-diesel, and worms. A formula for freedom and a significant step towards no-impact living. As for the current episode of the No Impact adventure with the Huffington Post, stay tuned: I will be calling on the bevy of green-centric info of my latest publication,The Whole Green Catalog. Hope you will too.

To Sign Up For HuffPost's No Impact Week which starts October 18th, Click Here!

 

Comments

[YCSTS]

Actually, Big Oil is a strong promoter of Solar Power. Why? Because they no it won't make even a small dent in their Energy Hegemony, but it sucks away funds & opportunity from realistic alternatives.

The average energy consumption of an American (USA total energy consumption per capita) is 97MWh per year. A 1 kw pk Solar PV at an average USA location - Witchita, Kansas delivers 1401 kwh of output per year. So you would need 69 kw peak of Solar PV on your roof - if you have an ideal location - Southern facing roof inclined at latitude and no trees or buildings blocking the Sun.

At current installed costs of Solar PV, at about $6 per pk watt, that's $414,000 per person. For a family of four thats $1.66 million. And replace that every 20 to 30 yrs. And then you need backup for the Winter when Solar is low, for long periods of cloudy weather and about 16 hrs a day. Backup costs at least $2000 per kw for 6 hrs storage. So for overnight storage you need $5,300 x ~40kw = $213,000 per person.

SolarPV also releases about 50 gm CO2 per kwh, vs Nuclear at 6 gm CO2 per kwh. And if you think Solar PV is green, See:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/08/AR2008030802595.html

[sheila]

Avg. US household uses ~ 11,000 kWh/year, and in Wichita, that amount could be generated by ~ 7 kW system (much smaller in a sunnier place). If KS would join us in this century, they would offer rebates in the $2/watt range, plus the 30% fed tax credit, making the net to the owner roughly $4/watt, so the total system would cost $28,000, amortized over 25 years, so it would cost ~ $1,100/year or $95/month. Average electric bill in Wichita is $135 (and will almost certainly go up) so the net savings for installing PV will be roughly $15,000 to $20,000 over the life of the system.

You don't need to produce some mythical, and almost impossible to calculate "gross amount of energy used by a human in all areas of their mythical life." You need to produce "a portion of the power consumed by this structure."

And I totally agree that CHINESE PV is BAD and we should not buy it. US, Europe and Japan, of course are COMPLETELY CLEAN, and recycle all waste. Wish the same could be said about the nuclear waste time bombs you are pretending don't exist.

[YCSTS]

Most people have a hard time buying a used car, never mind financing a $28,000 Solar PV system. Asking the taxpayer to subsidize the well-to-do, on a non-solution, is immoral and bogus logic. Truthfully, you are talking a $42,000 system, financed at a very low 5% for 25 years is $245 per month, or 14.3 cents per kwh, assuming an ideal roof location & perfect maintenance (big assumption). And the taxpayer is left to pay for the backup power THAT INEVITABLY MUST BE PROVIDED!

What you call mythical is REALITY! You can choose to ignore the energy that goes into your food, transportation, home, SolarPV, schools, workplace, hospitals, military - but then that makes you a phony greenie - green on the outside, black as coal on the inside.

US firms have been caught sending Solar Waste to China, supposedly for recycling but ending up in landfills. Actually even in the USA Solar PV produces substantial toxic waste, probably >100,000X in volume of Nuclear Waste for the same energy output.

My lifelong REAL SHARE of nuclear electrical energy will generate 1 cup of Nuclear Waste, which is fuel for GenIV reactors. Your substitute Coal waste will generate 100 tonnes of Solid Waste & 578,000 cubic meters of CO2. You will also consume 420,000 cubic meters of Oxygen.

[Chuck Teller]

Renee - cool project. on the waste side, you and your readers should know that the http://catalogchoice.org mail preference service works with over 1,000 mailers and is free to use.

[sheila]

Thanks for this, Renee. It is very inspiring, especially that you used your rooftop resources to cache your water, heat your water and produce your electricity. Big Water, Big Solar, Big Coal and Big Gas are incredibly harmful to our planet. 20% of the total electricity used in CA, for example, is just to move water around. Meanwhile NOBODY captures rainwater or and almost nobody has solar panels of either type. It is a travesty.

Meanwhile, the cop-out brigade is out there promoting huge-scale destruction of open space for "green" power? WTF? Why on earth would we support another Big Energy monopoly that slaughters millions of acres of our functioning ecosystems to do what WE could all do on our own properties? EVERY region in America receives enough sunshine to produce all it's electricity needs on existing rooftops. The Big Solar/Big Transmission Robber Barons are trying to convince us all that we need to kill our precious deserts, but it ain't true. Big Enviros are accepting money from Big Energy to greenwash these deadly industrial power plants - really distressing.

All while people like you keep proving that WE can democratically, affordably, and ethically save the planet, one rooftop at a time.

So, THANK YOU again.

[tbirdalum]

Good post, sheila, I've been of the opinion that "Point of Use" is the best route to go. Cut out the middle man. I do think that we should have more of a tax credit than 30% to install these on our roofs. But, using vast amounts of the land for large-scale facilities would'nt be the way I would go either. Thank you.

[ResidualSelfImage]

Great use for paper.
In New Hampshire we burn it for energy.

[Jonathan Smith 1]

WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP...

Sorry, had to shut off the science alarm.

I liked your randy worm story Renee. I, too, am a vermicomposter.

Hi, Verm!

Hi.

I just wanted to make a small correction to the facts in your story. Bacteria break down the paper and the worms eat the bacteria. And, just paper won't work. Composting is about maintaining a good carbon / nitrogen balance.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks, Verm!