Clean Energy Springfield

Thinking about replacing your incandescent lights with more efficient compact fluorescent light (CFLs) bulbs? Or perhaps you want to replace an old wall-mounted thermostat with a programmable unit that allows you to scale back on heating and cooling to save energy when you're away or sleeping. If the answer is “yes,” there are a few things you need to know about mercury, a toxic metal that is found in many household and commercial products.

Let’s focus on CFLs first. They contain a small amount of mercury, an average of 5 milligrams – about the amount that would cover the tip of a ballpoint pen. Mercury is a key element of CFLs that makes them an efficient light source. Unfortunately, there’s no better substitute right now.

The mercury in a CFL is not a threat to the environment unless the glass is broken. Even though the bulbs are rarely touched while in use, they can break if dropped or roughly handled. So be careful when removing the bulb from its packaging, installing it, or replacing it.

If a CFL bulb breaks, the most important thing to remember is to never use a vacuum to clean up the broken glass. A standard vacuum will spread mercury-containing dust throughout the area as well as potentially contaminating the vacuum.

U.S. EPA has published guidelines for consumers on how to cleanup a broken CFL bulb. While the broken bulb and cleanup materials may be set out in a sealed plastic bag with your normal trash for disposal, an environmentally preferable approach would be to take these items to a household hazardous waste (HHW) collection event for recycling. This would mean labeling the sealed bag “Mercury Waste – broken lamp, “ and storing it in a safe place until a collection event comes to your community.

To determine if your town has made arrangements for hosting an event of this type, check out Illinois EPA’s web site. The City of Springfield and Sangamon County have sponsored HHW collections at the State Fairgrounds in the past and it’s likely that more events will be scheduled. They have normally taken place in the spring.

And what should you do with a burned-out CFL? While consumers can lawfully dispose of CFLs in household garbage, the preferable approach again would be to take them to a HHW collection event for recycling. Put each used CFL in a sealed plastic bag and store the lot of them in a padded box in a safe place until the collection event takes place. At the event, the bulbs will be packaged and sent to a processing center where the mercury is reclaimed and the glass is reprocessed.

Unfortunately, HHW collection events are held only a limited number of times at different locations around the state each year. Most consumers do not like to keep waste materials around between collections. More convenient recycling and disposal mechanisms are needed. The long-term solution is for U.S. EPA and state solid waste officials to work with the bulb manufacturers and major retailers to create more convenient options for recycling. In Vermont, a collection program was established through a partnership between the state and True Value hardware stores to take back spent fluorescent lamps from consumers. The program has been expanded to include Ace hardware stores as well. More than 60 stores in that state now provide lamp recycling services to consumers.

In my next posting, I’ll discuss ways for "do-it-yourselfers" to properly dispose of old wall-mounted thermostats that contain mercury tilt switches.

You may be thinking about replacing an old wall-mounted thermostat with a programmable unit that will automatically adjust your home’s temperature settings while you’re away or sleeping. Electronic thermostats can help you save energy and save money on utility bills — when used properly, about $150 a year. They are better for the environment, since using less energy helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with energy production.

But what about your old thermostat? Don’t just throw it away. It may contain mercury, especially if it is one of the round units. To see if your thermostat contains mercury, carefully remove the front cover to look for one or more glass bulbs containing a silver liquid. If you see this, you have a mercury-switch thermostat. These thermostats use mercury tilt switches containing on average 3 grams of mercury. While the device is operational and the mercury is enclosed, the thermostat does not pose a health risk, but mercury spills could arise if the thermostat is not handled and disposed of properly at the end of its life.

If you hire a licensed HVAC service technician to install your new, programmable thermostat, ask him/her if their firm is participating in a mercury-switch thermostat recycling program. If they are, see if they will take your old one for disposal. Also, you can dispose of mercury-containing thermostats at household hazardous waste collections that are periodically held in Springfield and other parts of the state. For a list of upcoming collection events, visit Illinois EPA’s web site or look for an announcement in your local newspaper.

If you choose to wait for a household hazardous waste collection, place the mercury-switch thermostat in a sealable plastic bag. Never remove the internal mercury switch from the thermostat. Use a sticker or some other form of identification to mark the bag “Mercury-containing item” and store the thermostat in a safe place away from children.

A commenter on Kevin's post about recycling asks if we've seen the PBS show on global dimming. I haven't, but I'm aware of the gist of it--that all of our other pollution has so far masked much global warming, by bouncing some solar energy out into space. That, along with other occasional news stories about everything happening faster than expected, leads our commenter to plaintively ask:

I'm not sure how to sleep at night and I never felt so powerless or depressed. Is there ANY hope at all to stop or reverse global warming?

It's not an uncommon sentiment, but it's one that I don't share, much. Global warming isn't one thing or the other. For example, we have already warmed some and (for example) species are already going extinct--and we have more warming already locked in. So, in one sense, global warming is here. The key thing, though, is that there is still much preventable warming, which we can choose to not let happen.

And that choosing is crucial. There is plenty that we can do to stop global warming, but we have to make it happen. We have to choose it, over and over again.

Our commenter asks if there's any hope at all to stop global warming. I say yes. I see it everywhere. I see action on just about every possible front. Is it enough? I don't know. Could it be more? Sure. And that's where the choices we make today are crucial.

It may not show yet, but Springfield is alive with sustainability and anti-global warming action. There are at least four groups with major commitments to slowing warming: this group, Clean Energy Springfield; the local Sierra Club (the big dog, really); Sustainable Springfield, Inc., and the other CES, Community Energy Systems, which works outside of Springfield, but in our area. That's not even counting the many various allied groups, that focus more closely on other aspects of the problem, such as the Illinois Stewardship Alliance, the UIS student group SAGE, faith-based groups like Pax Christi, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the Springfield Bicycle Club, as well as some of the public health groups that promoted the smoking ban.

All of that is to say: We are alive with opportunity. Worried about global warming: get involved. Contact your aldermen and representative. Get an energy audit. Attend one of CWLP's community energy meetings.

Despair makes us look around and see problems. Hope lets us look around and see opportunities. And they are plentiful--maybe too plentiful, sure. Getting started is tough, but once you're started, it gets easier and easier. None of the groups above care if all you do is attend a meeting--come find out what we're about. Find out what we're doing. Attend enough, and pretty soon something will jump out at you that you can do. It may take an hour. It may be a Saturday clean-up or a writing a letter. But you can build on it. And we can be great together.

One of the problems with green building, and with renovations and rehabs in general, is that you produce a lot of waste, and you have to be dedicated to extracting the re-usable bits to do anything with it. (The horrible pile of crap left over from the American Legion demolition is an example.)

Of course, if you build it for deconstruction, it gets a lot easier. That's what companies like Herman Miller do--their "Design for environment" commitment includes disassembly as a major part of the process. We tend to think of buildings a little different, though. We tend to think about building to last, even though we know it won't--at some point, everything will get replaced or built over. That's not go-go capitalist creative destruction, that's how buildings learn.

And so it tickles me pink to find the answer to your drywalling needs: how to install drywall in a way that it can be removed later for reuse. (Drywall is a weird thing, in that technically, it's basically just gypsum, which is calcium, which is a good soil additive, so you can break it up and compost it, except that if it's painted or wallpapered, you probably can't separate it out to use without keeping all that toxic stuff on it. Dunno if something like milk paint overcomes this problem.)

The solution is called Green Zip Tape. For a normal drywall installation, you screw the drywall to studs, then plaster over it with joint compound, usually two or three layers. This tape, though, serves as the first layer--it goes over the screws at seams, and then you put the joint compound over it. You leave a tab exposed at the top or bottom (covered by trimwork, of course). When the house is being renovated or demolished, you can pull the tab of tape left over--that pulls up the tape, as well as the top layers of joint compound, leaving you easy access to the screws underneath. Unscrew it, and presto--you have a basically intact sheet of drywall, ready for its next use.

As an aside, one of the things I like about this is that it seems very classic in its trickery, through the use of trim to cover up the seems. My own uninformed sense is that a lot of fashion (in clothes) was historically about hiding seams and joins--flys are designed to cover buttons or zippers, ties and vests cover buttons on shirts, that sort of thing. This seems to fit into that tradition well by using trim not as decoration, but as a tool for layered concealment.

The downside, of course, is that it doesn't seem to be commercially available yet.

Coming out of the Schnucks on Chatham Road yesterday, I got stuck in congestion. Not vehicular congestion, this was a slow-moving conga line of shoppers. I veered out of the path, off to the right, preferring the longer walk at a faster pace to the slower, shorter trudge. As I did so, something caught my eye: the plastic bag recycling bin had gotten a makeover: What had been, I think, a blue plastic bin with slogans draped around the slot in the top had become a faux-wood box.

My first reaction was not, I confess, very big-hearted: "That's tacky." But my eyes dropped down to the sign on the front of the bin, and I got interested. The faux wood is Trex, a wood and plastic composite molded into beams for use outside. The sign said that Trex is one of the materials made from recovered plastic bags.

This, I thought with the fervor of a convert, is pretty great. Whoever came up with this is pretty brilliant. One of the big problems with non-regulatory approaches to environmentalism is keying people into how the environment and economy interact, the way that individual actions build toward something ecologically sound or ecologically disastrous. Stuff like Fair Trade and Bird-Friendly labels on coffee is one way to work it on the consumer side. This, on the waste management side, is another. One of the problems with recycling is that at the point of disposal recycling and just throwing something away sort of feel the same. The blue bin counteracts it somewhat, but there's little in the way of positive feedback to help keep you going. (Seeing products advertised as made with recycled materials is another way, but that's complex since it's also a selling tool. The Trex box nicely reinforces what you're doing.

[cross posted to The Other Leading Blog]

Halloween is just around the corner, but it’s not too late to think about ways to “green” this black and orange holiday. Here are 10 tips to get you started:

1. If you decorate with lighting, look for LED holiday lights that use less energy, burn cooler and last longer than traditional incandescent lights.

2. Buy your pumpkin from the local farmer’s market or pumpkin patch, which will help save fuel in the transportation of products.

3. If you have to drive to take your kids trick-or-treating, carpool with family or friends to help reduce traffic and air pollution.

4. Try not to follow your children in the car as they walk from house to house. If the weather is good, join them and have fun while saving gas.

5. Use a canvass tote or pillowcase to collect treats instead of a disposable plastic or paper bag.

6. Make costumes from clothes you already have around the house instead of buying disposable ones from a store.

7. Minimize waste by purchasing candy that uses the least amount of packaging.

8. Start a compost pile and recycle your jack-o-lantern, along with leaves and other organic materials.

9. Purchase durable decorations that you can reuse from year to year.

10. Use this holiday to think about your daily habits and actions to protect the environment every day of the week.

I discovered an interesting web site at work today that provides a simple tool to help homeowners and others calculate the payback time and return on investment of dozens of energy-saving and other green products for residential buildings. I haven’t tried it yet, but thought I would pass the information along.

Known as GreenandSave.com, the web site was created by an architect with expertise in green home design and remodeling. This site makes it easy to see the up-front costs and long term savings for a variety of products, including programmable thermostats, low-flush toilets, high efficiency windows, greywater systems and even planting trees.

Perhaps CWLP could feature this resource or create something similar to help its customers make more informed choices about energy and water efficiency products that can help reduce utility bills and save money.