That's Sick

I've been sick for the past few days. It started Friday when I developed a massive headache and chills. Fortunately one of my friends happily skipped downstairs to my room to give me some Advil, and I slept okay for the rest of the night. Saturday I was air-headed, and I'm significantly better today.

We went to a fancy restaurant yesterday night as a good-bye dinner, and some of us noted that the restaurant used "cheap" paper towels that we see in public restrooms as opposed to the nice and hefty white ones in other upscale restaurants. With this case, luxury doesn't correlate with eco-friendliness.

The same could also be the same for cars. I remember some random fact that it took "n" amount of cows to upholster a Benz. Usually the larger luxury cars are heavier, using more steel to be constructed, and have larger engines, which use more gasoline, than regular economy cars. Few people brag about how they bought a Ford Focus, while the owners of a Bentley would probably enjoy showing it off.

Economical. Luxurious. Environmental. How are all of these related?

Project Annie Chun

As suggested by one of my dear readers, I'm going to bury one of Annie Chun's "biodegradable bowls" in my backyard, and I'll document the decomposition over time and post it on Youtube. This is going to rock. Stay tuned!

New Cell Phone Time!

There's an article in my school newspaper about the cell phone recycling program. I've noticed the bins around the school with labels about helping breast cancer (I think); most of them seem to be empty, but I don't want to rouse suspicion that I'm trying to steal personal information from old cell phones.

Is this a way to make people feel less bad about buying a shiny new phone when their old one is... old (two years or whatever the "new cell phone free for ___ months" contracts are)?

I love Annie Chun

Back in my room, and since I'm lazy I busted out a noodle pack. Right now I'm heating water for it, and as I'm reading the label, I see that the pack proclaims that,

"This meal comes to you in a biodegradable bowl that decomposes in the soil. It's better for the planet and one small way we can care for our environment."

What a woman. Able to manage a large meal-kit company while saving the world at the same time. Too bad she's married, as she also points out on another facet of the pack to connect to Mom's everywhere to comfort them that this meal is indeed "healthful and great tasting." Is she also comforting the environmentally-conscious on the facet of the package that features a golden globe?

Annie Talks about her Biodegradable Bowls!

battery man!

The "critically low battery life" alarm is going off. Electrochemical reactions power at least something in your close vicinity right now, and they do it pretty well until they run out of juice. So what do you do? Recharge em! Or slide in new ones.

Let's take recharging on a basic level; you just reverse the reaction by inputting electrons from the power outlet, and you can have an almost new battery. After a few charges, the capacity of the battery reduces since the ions develop "memory" so they don't go back to their original state. I used to have a plug-in rechargeable flashlight; it started getting dimmer and dimmer over a few years until it didn't really work. Then I threw it away and bought another one. Would it have been better if I got a regular one and just switched Alkaline batteries or used separate rechargeable batteries?

I'm going to make a bold claim and say that the Sun is the source of all energy. Sunlight comes in, makes the plants happy, plants make the herbivores happy, herbivores make the carnivores happy, and dead things make the decomposers happy. Everything makes humans happy. We do get oil from dead things, metals from stones made up of... dead things I guess. Dust to dust. All in all, we have one big happy circle of happiness.

In order to get maximum happiness, we should take the shortest, smoothest path to and from the well so as little happiness drips out of our bucket as we skip along. So which is it? Simply make new batteries that are one use? Or make batteries that are multiple use, but require more inputs of happiness to run, before finally becoming so sad no amount of happiness can console them.

And so ends my really random extended metaphor. As well as my battery. 00:03 left!

Flood of Boxes

I tried to dump a cardboard box in the recycling bin, and I was reprimanded. Now I recall the days of move-in and how we weren't allowed to 'recycle' the cardboard boxes of stuff. We had to throw them into the dumpster. If we have separate bins for office paper and newspaper, why can't we have one for cardboard? Then again, not many people follow the rules on the bins; I realized it maybe one to two months in that the two blue bins were there for a purpose. It would probably be easiest to lump everything in one giant bin. Call it the "waste bin." Solves all the difficulties, right?

It Feels Sooo Good

Recently the dish washer in my school's cafeteria broke down (again). Now we're using paper plates and cups. I've been unconsciously cramming everything into a paper plate before throwing it away in the garbage, probably to give myself a sense of accomplishment even though it's inconsequential since the garbage should be compacted at some point in time

Ahhh

It's been supremely busy at school, and I haven't have much time for anything outside of studying, homeworking, setting-fire-accidentally-to-things-that-aren't-supposed-to-be-flammable-ing.

I originally thought that the answer to the goodness/badness of recycling is a simple cost analysis. See how much energy is used to cut a tree, truck it over, and then make paper with it, and then compare the energy use when old paper is collected, sorted and then made into paper products. Simple, right?

Then I took statistics class with my high school track coach. Statistics cannot be trusted. One problem is taking samples. A random sample has to be truly random, not count off every other house/tree. The logistics of doing this to account for EVERYTHING in a state is formidable; think of what the EPA goes through in a study -- it ends up being a mix of stratified random sampling and all that jazz. Maybe I do take a sample, but is it then representative?

Maybe after I do all the proper safeguards and then find out that each year recycling puts out 500000000 tons of sulfides into the air, draws one bajillion watts of energy and that making stuff from scratch kills 30000 acres of trees and draws one bajillion watts of energy while pumping out 40 pounds of dioxins. How are we going to quantify which is worse? The units don't match! Maybe some people would consider sulfides acceptable, while others think the dioxins don't matter... Then we get into the debate about sulfides v. dioxins. And then maybe recycling will have social effects on certain groups; maybe the 43-year-old accountant for a vitamin firm will discover recycling and then join an environmentalist group... and then set fire to Humvees. The idea of saying if recycling is 'good' or 'bad' is simply too complex to be treated as an on/off switch. Oh, what to do?

Paper is biodegradable, so if you give it enough time, it'll turn to dirt. I checked on the dirty magazine I hid under some bushes when I was maybe 12, and it's still there, although unreadable. Imagine how slowly paper would turn to dirt when it's packed in a landfill. Probably the cheapest method of recycling paper is to throw it away in your backyard pile. Or use it as insulation for the next building project.

Plastics are different, although scientists are developing bacteria to eat it away. Right now, there are all those numbers on the plastics that dictate whether or not it can be recycled, but once at the plant, they need to be further sorted before recycling. And what about those rings on water bottles that might be made of different material? And the labels and the gunk? Maybe recycling isn't cheaper than trashing, but you'll then be exposed to photos of poor cute animals choking on plastics. Would you let Mr. Pelican die?

On that note, people generally say that recycling metals saves energy since after all people collected and sold scrap metal before the entire environmentalist movement started. Ah, I still remember the neighborhood peddler who would scream on his megaphone that we will "repair windows, buy metals."