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Actions Around the Home

The Frog will explore The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions by Heidi Roop in the first 100 days of 2024

You may be planning where you are going to retire or move to next for a job or to be closer to family. You should consider this carefully. For instance, I had a colleague you decided to retire with his wife to Florida near the coast. They are relatively young and could live 20 or 30 years in their new home. Increased likelihood and intensity of hurricanes aside, I hope they consulted NOAA’s Sea Level Rise viewer when they made their decision on where to invest in retirement properties. Knowing his politics, unlikely.

Enjoy visiting Key West, Florida? Better enjoy it while it is above water.

To paraphrase Heidi, wherever you go, something you care about is at risk from climate change. If you are moving, you do research on the area on what is important to you, cost of living, housing prices, quality of schools and healthcare, etc. Presumably the possibility of catastrophic loss for your family and your possessions would be something you would consider as well. As the impact of weather events intensify with on-going global warming, a given area’s sensitivity to sea level rise, flooding, wildfires and drought should increasingly become critical data informing your decisions.

“In 2021, there were twenty billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the United States, causing $`152.6 billion in damage”

Heidi Roop

If you don’t consider it, the insurance companies surely are. Coastal areas in the US are home to 42% of the population in the US. With the increased risks for people, habitats, infrastructure, etc., insurance companies are increasing the cost of policies or dropping coverage altogether. The National Flood Insurance Program, run by FEMA, ostensibly provides subsidized flood insurance to policyholders living in flood-prone regions. But it is increasingly less likely to be able to pay claims in years with catastrophic losses.

It is idyllic to live along a river until the climate change intensified torrential rains come and it isn’t.

Minnesota is not a bad place to live, as we are generally unaffected by earthquakes, and hurricanes. We do have the occasional tornado, and blizzard, I suppose and you learn to live with that. With climate change, we are going to be warmer, wetter, and more prone to damaging rain events, which means flooding is going to be a bigger problem. Still, even with all that, it might be a good place to retire.

Useful decision making tools include FEMA’s Flood Maps, NOAA’s Sea Level Rise viewer, and the US Forest Service’s Wildfire Risk to Communities maps.

Next Up: Climate Action in 2024 – Day 52: Check Your Insurance Policy

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Email: rescuethatfrog@gmail.com

Shopping and Consumer Choices

The Frog will explore The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions by Heidi Roop in the first 100 days of 2024

Greenwashing – “the act or practice of making a product, policy, activity, etc. appear to be more environmentally friendly or less environmentally damaging than it really is”. As in hopelessness also leaves people more vulnerable to greenwashing  campaigns by fossil fuel companies – Matt Simon, WIRED, 27 Dec. 2023.

Hopelessness or hopefulness? I would like to be encouraged by a 2021 published marketing study shows that 34 percent of consumers globally are willing to pay more for sustainable goods and 63 percent report taking action to be more sustainable in their consumer behavior.

Cynically you can conclude that marketing departments read this study and got to work aligning current or new products to make sure they capture the sustainably conscious demographic. Akepa, an agency focused on sustainable marketing provided a in-depth exploration of examples of greenwashing – check out the claims made by some of your favorite companies including Delta, Hefty, Keurig, and IKEA.

As in all interactions with advertising and social media, dial up your skepticism. Look out for (and do business with) the companies that are working for real change including reducing packaging, eliminating toxic chemicals, decarbonizing their manufacturing processes and supply chain (Scope 3 emissions), and design for repair, reuse, and recycling of their products.

EcoWatch is a useful resource to support your skepticism and combat greenwashing as you take action. They suggest some simple habits to aid you in the choices you make:

• Ignore the hype – read past the marketing rhetoric. Look for simple language and claims that are backed up with testing and reporting.
• Check for clarity – scrutinize claims; often they only refer to the packaging or a part of the product
• Look for certifications – reputable companies will seek third-party endorsements like B Corp, USDA organic or fair trade certification

Here’s your homework for this week. Spot all the ways ExxonMobil is greenwashing the hell out of everyone in this recent ad:

Next Up: Climate Action in 2024 – Day 51: Consider Where You Make Your Home

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Email: rescuethatfrog@gmail.com

Shopping and Consumer Choices

The Frog will explore The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions by Heidi Roop in the first 100 days of 2024

We have gotten used to convenience in how we make our purchases. We may rationalize that we are living our complicated lives in complicated times and we should not have to labor to purchase the items we need. One-click shopping has been made so easy and convenient, that we lose sight of the impact we are having on the climate and our environment.

“… shopping at places that reflect our values – whether they be social, environmental, political or all of the above – can have a direct and positive impact on us”

Heidi Roop

But we should take the time to research and make choices that can make a change. There are big differences in the outlook and approach companies are taking to addressing the issues you care about. The good news is that there is an organization “dedicated to making social and environmental data available to consumers who wish to utilize their dollars as votes in order to help build a better world”.

The Better World Shopping Guide is a comprehensive guide to choosing the companies that fit your values and amplifying their actions through you directing your purchases to them. By researching reliable databases, the Better World Shopping Guide provides a grade for companies based on these five critical criteria:

You can search the companies of interest to you and make a decision on whether they are worthy of your business. You can also buy the Better World Shopping Guide as a handy pocketbook or app or the more comprehensive Better World Handbook for a more comprehensive approach.

The Better World Shopping guide is one of the resources that can aid your own research as you make consumer choices if you are looking to choose reputable and ethical companies and minimize the carbon footprint of your purchases. It is also a good reference guide if you suspect that a company is engaging in greenwashing, the subject of our Day 50 Action!

Next Up: Climate Action in 2024 – Day 50: Beware Greenwashing

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Email: rescuethatfrog@gmail.com

Shopping and Consumer Choices

The Frog will explore The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions by Heidi Roop in the first 100 days of 2024

How many old cellphones do you have stashed away? It turns out, globally only 1% of smartphones are recycled. The environmental cost of e-waste is staggering as we manufacture, use, and discard them. In 2019, for instance, 53.6 million metric tons of e-waste with $57 billion worth of precious metals wasted in reckless disposal practices.

Smartphone manufacturing is a major source of carbon emissions, as much as 125 million metric tons of CO2e annually. The production processes for smartphones is the bulk of the emissions with only 16% of the emissions coming from actual usage. The accumulation of e-waste at the end of life has impacts beyond the climate. It is environmental justice issue in that disadvantaged communities and developing nations are increasingly the victim of the waste we generate.

Historically the societal preference is to throw away the old and buy the new. Recycling e-waste is a challenge and manufacturers are not driven to provide recycled content in new device (see what Apple does). It is likely that you live in an enlightened community and you are encouraged to recycle your electronics. The key driver that while the amount is small, electronic waste in landfills represents 70% of the overall toxic chemicals that are present.

If you are a conscientious recycler of your electronics, you may feel satisfied as you drive away after dropping your devices at your local recycling center. What happens next, though? It could be that your device gets scrapped and shipped to another country, to avoid the high labor cost and environmental protections that we enjoy in the US. It often ends up in toxic dumps where workers, at great peril, salvage some valuable components for pennies per pound.

If you want some confidence that your discarded electronics will not be shipped to Pakistan, consider recycling them with Ridwell, who works with responsible recyclers that minimize the environmental impact of the process.

For your personal actions, given the climate cost of manufacturing these devices, keeping them longer is your best way to have an impact. And be motivated to responsibly recycle them.

And keep in mind that using the device has a hidden climate cost as “every text, email, funny meme, or online purchase we make requires a server and data center, which are incredibly energy intensive”. Check out the climate challenge of data centers and storage, and why it is a major problem for the US.

Next Up: Climate Action in 2024 – Day 49: Shop Your Values

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Email: rescuethatfrog@gmail.com

Shopping and Consumer Choices

The Frog will explore The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions by Heidi Roop in the first 100 days of 2024

Continuing our discussion of e-commerce from Day 46 let’s consider the wisdom of drones delivering our packages. Seriously. It is easy to dismiss that potential future out of hand, but the issue lies with the last mile. Companies can plan for and control the emissions for the shipment of goods from sources to distribution warehouses, but getting the packages to individual homes is usually has the biggest impact on the carbon footprint of a given transaction.

Organized and implemented well, routine drone delivery is not a bad option, short of using a fleet of bicycle couriers (easier to do in dense population centers). According to research from Carnegie-Mellon, for smaller packages with high relative value, drones are a legitimate energy efficiency choice, with only e-cargo bicycles as a better alternative (for small package delivery).

For your current e-commerce habits, you can positively impact the last-mile emissions of your purchases by adopting important habits. The most important is choosing the timing of your deliveries. The short delivery options (one-day to one-hour) constrain the delivery companies in such a way that they trade off energy efficiency and thus emissions to meet the consumer-imposed deadline. Short delivery windows can result in as much as a 180% increase in emissions associated with the delivery.

Heidi suggests several habits to adopt, depending on where e-commerce fits in your daily life. These include:

• Use the “auto-ship” function for recurring purchases of staple goods that you use routinely. This give full autonomy to the shipper to optimize the delivery to reduce their cost and emissions.
• Be thoughtful and explore slower and combined shipping options.
• Resist the urge to buy more than what you need from an online retailer if you are not sure exactly what you want (relying on returns, which amplify the emissions). This is especially true for clothing and shoes, which may better be purchased in a brick and mortar store.
• As always, choose your companies with a little research so that they align with your values. Many retailers are not interested in sustainability and will not do what it takes to reduce the climate impact of your purchases.

“With a little planning and forethought, we can save money and reduce the climate impact of our online purchases”

Heid Roop

Next Up: Climate Action in 2024 – Day 48: Keep Your Devices Longer and Dispose of Them Properly

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Email: rescuethatfrog@gmail.com

Shopping and Consumer Choices

The Frog will explore The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions by Heidi Roop in the first 100 days of 2024

If you have not reflected on it, you may have mixed feelings using a one click option from the comfort of your home to order that item you may feel you need right now. The order is made simply, your credit card is charged, you wait a bit, a truck pulls up, and someone gets out and places a box at your door.

As a society, we do this a lot. Pause a minute and estimate how many packages are delivered in the US every year. Highlight here for the answer –> 165 billion packages shipped every year. That’s 500 packages per person.

Is it more efficient for you to grab your keys, drive to the store, and buy the item you bought online? Maybe not. Amazon uses an algorithm called Condor (Customer Order and Network Density Optimizer) to optimize the routes and schedules for their drivers that helps them save miles, money, and emissions.

“Improved coordination and efficiency could reduce up to 84 percent of emissions from e-commerce transportation!”

Heidi Roop

The environmental impact of e-commerce infrastructure remains a significant social justice issue, though. The warehouses that support the industry are often located close to disadvantage communities, exposing the residents to increased pollution like nitrous oxides, increased traffic and noise. In a report from Mother Jones, José Acosta-Córdova of Little Village Environmental Justice Organization in Chicago laments that “our communities are being sacrificed in the name of economic development.”

Your impact can be programmed into the choices you make on what you order and how you choose to have it delivered. Often 1-day shipping is terrible for the climate, especially if you order items that you can get on your next trip to the grocery store. There is also a tendency to overbuy for convenience, especially clothes and shoes. Consumers order multiple pairs of shoes and clothing items with the intention of returning the ones they don’t want. This return habit for shoes and clothes – with a return rate of 56% – is costly, climate-wise.

To have an impact, be thoughtful, shop online with intention, and consolidate purchases as much as you can.

Next Up: Climate Action in 2024 – Day 47: Make More Thoughtful Online Purchases

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Email: rescuethatfrog@gmail.com

Shopping and Consumer Choices

The Frog will explore The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions by Heidi Roop in the first 100 days of 2024

Clothes wear out. Shirts and socks get thinner and “threadbare”. As you drive your car, your tires become progressively bald until you replaced them. Take a minute and reflect. Where do the fibers in your clothes and the rubber in your tires go?

Normal wear and tear of everyday objects results in the formation of microscopic plastic particles and fibers that are referred to as microplastics. On the order of 5 mm and smaller, these tiny bits of rubber, fibers, and plastics accumulate in the environment and represent as dire an existential threat to life on earth as on-going climate change.

About 80% of the microplastics in the environment come from textiles, tires, and dust generated in urban areas. You might have also heard of microbeads, which are microplastic products added to other products such as cosmetics. These have nominally been banned in many countries including the US, but still find their way into products and then into the environment.

Microplastics are found everywhere, including the ocean, sea ice, freshwater, soil wildlife and in increasing concentration in humans. For the first time in 2022, microplastics were found in fresh snow in Antarctica.

It is the global accumulation of microplastics in the ocean that has a serious climate implication. It is estimated that 12 million metric tons of plastic enters the ocean each year. The plastic is broken down into small fragments that can have serious effects on marine ecosystems. For more detail see Microplastics pose risk to ocean plankton, climate, other key Earth systems.

The climate issue is related to the zooplankton that are the basis for the marine food chain. A key ocean process is called the carbon or biological pump. Carbon dioxide is dissolved into the ocean and taken up by the zooplankton. As part of the cycle, the carbon ends up being stored in the deep ocean. Microplastics can reduce feeding rates and fertility and increase mortality of zooplankton, disrupting this carbon pump process. It can also result in increased algae blooms which locally reduces oxygen levels and degrades the overall health of the oceans.

Microplastics may be an intractable problem. How does one clean the large plastic trash from the ocean, let alone filter for plastics on the microscale? Closer to home, your local ecosystem may be impacted by microparticles of rubber from tire wear from your car and your local wastewater treatment system might not be dealing effectively with microfibers from synthetic fabrics that you launder.

Effective actions to take? Individually, consume less, use less plastic, drive less, and consider how you launder you clothes with synthetic fibers. For laundry, Patagonia has some useful suggestions.

Also consider supporting organizations like the Plastic Soup Foundation or the Plastics Pollution Coalition and lending your strong voice to their cause. It will take a focused, dedicated, and sustained effort to address the problem of microplastics in our oceans, in marine life, and in our bodies.

Next Up: Climate Action in 2024 – Day 46: Make More Thoughtful Online Purchases

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Email: rescuethatfrog@gmail.com

Shopping and Consumer Choices

The Frog will explore The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions by Heidi Roop in the first 100 days of 2024

“There’s a great future in plastics”, Mr. McGuire says to Benjamin in the film The Graduate, released in 1967. We are a plastics driven society. They are ubiquitous. From an energy standpoint, you can convince yourself that compared to high energy processes for other materials like glass and aluminum, plastic packaging is an energy efficient alternative. But their versatility and widespread use comes at a cost, in the greenhouse gas emissions from their production, transportation and use, accumulated mass in landfills, and widespread plastics pollution on land and at sea.

Ocean and shore pollution has surprising sources. For instance, 5 million tons of debris was washed into the Pacific Ocean during the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011. Source.

Plastics are produced from fossil carbon pumped up from storage in the earth in the form of crude oil. The simplest commercial plastic and most widely used is polyethylene, which is very simple, large hydrocarbon molecule that has useful properties for packaging and other commodity uses. If you think in terms of coal plants, the number for plastics production for use is 189. That is, the annual emissions from the production of plastics globally is equivalent to 189 coal plants polluting around the clock.

Without a wholesale change in attitudes on plastics consumption and recycling, those associated emissions will unsustainably increase and the downstream problems of disposal and pollution will only get worse.

What we really must address is plastics packaging, which is what we most encounter in our daily lives. It represents 40% of the plastics production and is most likely to be discarded after a single use, often in the store parking lot or on the side of the road. Most consumers do not stop and reflect on the impact that single-use packaging has on their lives, and their community. When surveyed, 71% of Americans state that they “use fewer single-use plastics to help protect the environment”.

As great deal of trash is treated as “waste-to-energy”, or burned to generate electricity. Often this is done in plants located in disadvantaged communities that cannot escape the chemical pollution and reduced air quality from the plants, even while utilizing the electricity from the source. Waste-to-energy can also be used as a questionable carbon offset that can be used by companies and governments in their calculation of their carbon footprint. Mother Jones is critical of the practice.

It is hard to go plastics free. Recently we informed our local high-end grocery store that they had a choice to source alternative bags to package their fresh baked bread – the ones they supplied inexplicably had a plastic window that rendered them unrecyclable.

Your lifestyle dictates what we can do, and add your voice to society to rapidly establish a circular economy that addresses plastics waste. Review your habits and adopt processes that reduce plastics while maintaining convenience, like keeping reusable shopping bags in your car for your use at the store. Review your county’s recycling policies and adhere to them to reduce the impact on your local recycling sorting center. Consider services like Ridwell, which (for a fee) will help you “sustainably reuse and recycle your stuff”. T

There may indeed be a great future in plastics, a future where their use is limited, circular, and has minimal impact on the environment. The plastics industry is responsible for making this a reality, and may only be motivated by emerging global regulation. As Heidi says “it is critical to encourage the manufacturing industry to accelerate the reduction, recycling, reuse and remanufacturing of plastic and invest in innovations to reduce the climate and environmental impacts of plastic”. Your voice is critical to drive them to act.

Next Up: Climate Action in 2024 – Day 45: Avoid Microplastics

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Shopping and Consumer Choices

The Frog will explore The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions by Heidi Roop in the first 100 days of 2024

There are plenty of situations where bottled water saves lives, when there is a disaster, for instance, or no ready access to potable water. But bottled water is not a long term solution to addressing water scarcity of quality. The US consumed 15.9 billion gallons of bottled water in 2022 which makes the US the largest global bottled water consumer market.

Given the ready supply of potable tap water in most of the US, we increasingly choose plastic bottles with brands such as Aquafina, Glacéau Smart Water, Dasani, and Poland Spring. We are marketed to relentlessly as callous companies seeking profits try to convince us that their water tastes better or is safer than what comes out of the tap.

Water should be free, but has been turned into a commodity. Pure. Pristine. Natural. 25% of the water bottled in the US comes from municipal water sources – Aquafina and Dasani in particular. To make other claims, the FDA thankfully has regulations for standards of identity. For example, if has more than 250 parts per million of total dissolved solids, you can call it “mineral water”. If you claim it is “spring water” the water has to be sourced from an underground formation which flows naturally to the surface.

FIJI Water is sourced entirely from an artesian aquifer in Viti Levu, an island in the Fiji archipelago. The product is marketed as “Earth’s finest water”. Wow. Refreshing. But Fiji is in the Pacific and it is a long way from there to here. Vox does not like them much. Among other indictments, apparently FIJI water has higher levels of arsenic compared to tap water.

So reach for the Dasani or Aquafina. It may be municipal water that you could otherwise get cheaply, but at least you know it wasn’t on a boat or plane to get it to your local store.

Hold a bottle of water and consider the source. As always we trace the entire supply chain from pumping and processing, manufacturing the bottles, filling and packaging, and transportation. From an energy standpoint and thus climate impact, municipal water from reusable containers is the clear choice. In a review of life cycle analyses it was clear that “tap water always has the best environmental performance, even in the case of high energy-consuming technologies for drinking water treatments”.

“It takes 1000 to 2000 times more energy to produce bottled water that tap water”

Heidi Roop

Oakdale MN provides its citizen a reliable source of clean drinking water at low cost. According to the 2022 water report, there were no violations or adverse events. Oakdale treats the water with additives for disinfection and fluoride to promote strong teeth. Many complain about the flavor, which stems from the disinfection process.

We have a granular activated carbon (GAC) filter in our refrigerator that removes all the additives and trace compounds to deliver a fresh, clean glass of water with little waste, no plastic (except the filter housing), and low expenditure of energy. I am also satisfied with the commitment that my company has made to provide ready sources of filtered municipal water for their employees.

I have adopted habits and invested in infrastructure so that rarely am I forced to drink from a plastic bottle bought from a store. My choice. My lifestyle. For others, convenience seems to be the driving factor for many to choose bottled water. We need voices online and in our communities to help people realize the impact on climate change and plastic pollution. Remember to stay hydrated (preferably from your tap)!

Next Up: Climate Action in 2024 – Day 44: Cut Down on Plastic

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Email: rescuethatfrog@gmail.com

Shopping and Consumer Choices

The Frog will explore The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions by Heidi Roop in the first 100 days of 2024

In 2015, a climate scientist was presenting a data driven talk at my company on how global warming was impacting the weather in the upper Midwest. The talk title “Climate Change in Our Own Backyard” presented an analysis of the data gathered by the vast network of weather stations in the stated and predicted the future based on facts: summers will be warmer and wetter, there will be more weather patterns with damaging heavy rains, and winters will be warmer. All these predictions have come to pass.

At the end of the session, there were questions. The presentation is open to all, and are not meant to be controversial. They can be so, it seems. For instance, in 2006 at a similar talk, someone stood up and asked whether the climate change data could be explained by something something contrails something. The speaker was gracious and answered politely that the data did not fit that hypothesis.

And so it was for the 2015 session. One of my enlightened colleagues at a supposedly science inspired manufacturing company stood up and asked the following: “would not climate change be solved if we eliminated half of the world’s population?”. The speaker, once again gracious, assured the person that less drastic solutions were possible to allow for population growth and reduced the effects of damaging climate change.

Call it the Thanos Decision – to snap your fingers, wipe out half the life in the Universe to bring balance and prevent overpopulation and depletion of resources. Search it, especially the debates of the amateur philosophers on Reddit or Quora. The ethical answer to whether his approach had merit is murky and the debate usually ends up somewhere around “maybe, but c’mon dude, really?”.

But research shows that the greatest action you can take to reduce emissions is to have one fewer child. In the study, the climate impact was arrived with an approach described by the authors where “half of a child’s emissions are assigned to each parent, as well as one quarter of that child’s offspring (the grandchildren) and so forth. This is consistent with our use of research employing the fullest possible life cycle approach in order to capture the magnitude of emissions decisions”.

The paper was more about the fact that governments and educational institution tended to play down the one-fewer child action in recommendations, opting for the more politically correct but way less effective actions of upgrading light bulbs and recycling. Classic greenwashing, in other words.

The decision to have a child is personal and complex, and impossible to quantify for any given person. True, one can perform a techno-economic analysis and decide that families that have one fewer child (or no children) in a wealthy country with high emissions per capita would have an impact on climate change. But the subject is nuanced and beyond the scope of this section.

If you are raising a family and are expecting a child, you will be, if you allow it, subjected to societal pressure and social media influence on just about every aspect of raising a child. One of the greatest controversies is the “Grand Disposable vs Cloth Diaper Debate” (which is actually not a thing and I only capitalized it for effect). What to put on your baby’s butt as a containment solution should be a decision based on your own values and family experience, and maybe informed, but not necessarily driven by data related to climate change.

So here it is. In the US, 95% of babies wear disposable diapers, and the discarded diapers end up as “about 7 percent of nondurable household waste in landfills each year”. This is obviously a municipal waste issue, and cloth diapers definitely have less of an impact on landfills.

But the climate impact of both disposable and cloth diapers is about balanced. When you do the life-cycle analysis of disposable diapers you find that their carbon footprint results in emissions equivalent to burning 62 gallons of gasoline in the average lifetime of their use (roughly 2.5 years). This is roughly consistent with the carbon footprint associated cloth diapers including the production process and the energy and water consumed in laundering during the same time period.

So when are anticipating the arrival of your child, make a good choice for your lifestyle and and if you choose to use disposable diapers, do the best you can to choose companies that fit your values. In our case, we were in a position to use cloth diapers for our first child, and it was not that much of a burden for new parents in graduate school. However, the complexity of our life with two children dictated the use of disposable diapers for the second, which was not all that much “easier” than the use of cloth diapers, but was compatible with our lifestyle at the time.

For parents, the diaper years are soon behind us, and the children continue to grow and hopefully thrive. Thus the most important action you can take and perhaps the biggest impact you can make is to raise your children with full awareness of the challenges they will face in a changing climate, and work to equip them with the knowledge and skills to take action when they are ready to be the climate leaders.

Next Up: Climate Action in 2024 – Day 43: Ditch the Bottled Water

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Email: rescuethatfrog@gmail.com