Growings, cuttings, eatings

We've been growing radishes (Raphanus sativus, French Breakfast variety) in 1 litre milk cartons - yesterday we actually ate the first one!

We also took hard wood cuttings of blackcurrant (Ribes nigrum) and raspberry (Rubus idaeus) plants, which I planted straight out into our boggy, waterlogged garden (much of County Cork has been flooded in the past week! Luckily Kinsale has been spared the worst - we have mains water which we have been advised to boil, but in Cork city there is no running water at all...). Hopefully these will take, and though they won't fruit while we are here, they should do in 2011 onwards.

Small steps. But towards something good, I think.

Just one small quote from the BBC: about the current situation in Dubai, "We have no rain, no tax and no jury service. I can think of many worse places to be." - from here.

No rain. Hmm. Well if you've been flooded out in the last week, you might agree, but really, when you need to grow your own food I know where I'd rather be!!

How much energy is embedded in a laptop?

This post says "loads". All the more reason to buy secondhand wherever possible, and only as new as you need.

I'm certainly guilty of buying newer than I need to. Thinking about getting a new computer? How about getting someone to speed up your current one, maybe upgrade the hard drive and RAM, instead?

Carbon emissions

A few interesting statistics:

In Ireland, each kWh of electricity you use emits about 600g of CO2: ESB stats

A one-way flight from Paris to Toronto emits about 0.7 tonnes of CO2 equivalent: Carbon Neutral Company (offsetting is contentious, I'm neither advocating nor criticising it, just using their calculator!)

According to the Stern report, the planet can deal with about 5 giga Tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year, giving each of us an "allowance" of roughly 750kg per year (i.e. my flight to Canada will be my entire year's fair allowance, near enough).

This Wikipedia link shows the UK average in 2007 at about 9.4 tonnes per person - 12+ times too much. Ireland is at 10.4 tonnes, while Canada is at 16.7. China is at 4.6 - of course a good chunk of this is in production for export, not for local consumption.

My own footprint? Well, this year has been rather an unusual one, but if you take my current circumstances - sharing a house, buying local food and foraging as much as possible, not owning a car... hmm, the Irish Environmental Protection Agency calculator thinks I use about 1.16 tonnes per year.

I should think I'll use a fair bit more than that. And if you factor in the travelling I did over the course of the year, I should think I'd be blushing bright red.

Where does your food come from?

I was stopped dead in my tracks on seeing this.

Suffice it to say that garlic grows very well in Ireland.

Energy use

So I'm eagerly awaiting our first energy bill (...).

There are four of us sharing this house, three of us here most of the time and one just down during the week. We put in mostly energy saving lightbulbs (they are REALLY expensive here, compared to the UK!), but one housemate doesn't want mercury in their room, and the lounge and kitchen have special light fittings.

We cook using electricity, have an electric shower. All four of us have laptops, mobile phones, and so on. We don't watch TV at all.

It'll be interesting to see what our bill is like!

Anyway, in the meantime I've been using my electricity metering gizmo (plug it into a socket, then plug the item you want to check into it) to compare different washing machine cycles, how much it takes to charge and use a laptop, etc.

For the washing machine, it's not been a scientific study, as the weight of the load going in and the outside temperature has changed between washes. On average, for a 30 degree load on the "Eco" setting it used 0.4 kWh; change this to 40 degrees and it jumps to 0.75 kWh. Interestingly, changing to a Cotton "Super Quick" wash at 40 degrees only uses 0.55kWh.

Anyway, the scale of the change from 30 to 40 degrees is huge.

Using the tumble drier, which we've had to do on the rainy but warm days, is horrible. To dry on high for an hour is 1.45kWh; on low, about 0.95kWh. A really heavy load might need to be on for a couple of hours, though!!

For a medium load, the drying only took 40 minutes on high, which would be just under 1kWh, where the wash only takes 0.4kWh - drying in the sunshine is much better!

I have also been looking at my laptops. I have two, one which went travelling round the world with me (a netbook - 10 inch screen), and a full sized dual core one (15.4 inch screen). They have roughly the same battery life; the small one takes 0.03kWh to charge the battery from flat, and the large 0.05kWh.

When plugged in, running and charged, the small uses about 15W and the large 25W. When I last had a desktop PC, before leaving the UK, it would use more than 100W including the TFT monitor. So if you do need to upgrade, a laptop is probably more sensible, and a small laptop the best - despite what the manufacturers say, most people don't need a brand new laptop, rather one that only runs programs the user needs... but that's a whole different story.

Unfortunately there is no way for my meter to plug into either the shower or the cooker, so I have no idea how much energy they are using.

Electricity is about €0.20 per kWh here. So running my large laptop for 40 hours straight would cost about €0.20. Not so bad, except almost all of the electricity here is generated from non renewable resources...

Plastics

I've borrowed The Whole House Book: Ecological Building Design and Materials (Amazon link) from our little college library, and got interested in the section on plastics.

Here's a good summary of what the "recycling" of plastics really means. Apparently PET bottles can actually be turned back into bottles - but this doesn't usually happen. Also, PET microwavable food trays are "physically and chemically different from PET bottles" - here. And that the trays are useless. So now I understand why they ask for plastic bottles only, not anything made from PET/recycling symbol 1 on.

What a mess.

Half term week

Quite an interesting week! Starting with the 350.org stuff, continuing with a bit of jogging, foraging, visiting friends, chatting.. not doing much college work.. reading about all sorts of bad things going on, and coming back to the same conclusion as always - do what you can, and don't stress about the rest.

The course here is a two year one, but I've decided that I'll not do the second year. The climate is totally different to that of Canada, and the plants that grow are also different. I'm sure there would be loads of value to be gained from doing the second year, but it just makes more sense to me to learn "on the job" in Canada.

I have been reading our course textbook, The Earth Care Manual (Amazon link), and one of the things it says is that flying is pretty much the worst thing we can do - that a round trip to Florida from the UK would use up all a lifetime's worth of emissions. Ouch.

So I think I'll be flying to Canada, and... not coming back. Wow. That's a big thing, but it makes sense. Time to put my money where my mouth is, so to speak.

Yesterday evening a load of people went to the Hollies for our teacher Paul's birthday party. Lots of drums, a few guitars, a couple of clarinets, and a flute were there... I was playing a collander for a while! Great fun.

Paul must have made about a hundred pizzas in their wood fired cob pizza oven. Yummy!

It just reemphasized for me how much fun you can have with low energy use! Ok that sentence sounds contrived, but it's true. A few people, some instruments, a fire.

This morning it is absolutely stunningly beautiful and sunny outside. I went down to the river, about half a mile's walk, and picked up driftwood to burn in our fire. Hard work, carrying just 3 logs back. I am a wimp!! It's another good point though - if it takes me half an hour or forty minutes to gather enough wood to burn for a couple of hours, think about how much energy is spent getting central heating fuels to your house. Think of the low efficiency in the pipes or transforming stations. Local and sustainable makes so much more sense.

Of course, the fact we have an incredibly inefficient open fire doesn't help! They are somewhere in the region of 25% efficient, where a wood burning stove might be 85%. A masonry stove might be 90% efficient, and release the heat over longer than a day!!

That's all for now, I think - time to cook up some roast potatoes! Mmmmm.