Man vs. Dishwasher

Hey Mr. Green,

Living in a 100-year-old house comes with primitive luxuries, like hand-washing the dishes. In considering a kitchen upgrade, though, I was wondering if putting in a dishwasher is a good idea. Which is greener, a dishwasher, or washing dishes by hand?

–Jocque in New Richmond, Wisconsin

As I’ve noted before, studies indicate that a dishwasher is greener than hand-washing. The EPA estimates that Energy Star-qualified dishwashers use half as much energy as hand-washing does, and 5,000 fewer gallons of water per year. To find the most efficient dishwasher brands, see the EPA’s Energy Star ratings. Some of these machines use as little as 1.6 gallons of water per cycle; many require around 3 gallons, and the maximum allowed for Energy Star is only 5.8 gallons.

However, in what may represent an epochal shift in human consciousness, more than a few men have boasted to me that their great dishwashing prowess leads them to doubt that a dishwashing machine is superior. These guys crow that their hand-washing techniques are so advanced, so ingenious, so hugely green that they can put any dishwasher to shame. Yep, they roll up their sleeves, plunge into suds up to their elbows, and simply outperform the machine. Who—among even the most optimistic reformers of domestic tasking—could have predicted that dishwashing skills might one day be upheld as a marker of manhood?

But all right, these guys may have a point. The studies I noted scrutinized a random sampling of dishwashers. It may be possible, though unlikely, given the numbers above, for the exceptional individual to get by with less water than the machine. In terms of gross water consumption, there is really only one scientific way to determine whether you're superior to the machine, and that is to wash an amount of dishes that equals the capacity of a fully loaded dishwasher, and then measure the amount of water you used.

This can be done simply by detaching the trap from your sink and allowing all the water to drain into a calibrated bucket, taking care not to let the bucket overflow. You then compare the total volume drained with the specifications of any given dishwasher. A less accurate though simpler method would be to leave the drain plugs in and carefully bail out and measure the water used rather than removing the trap. But I’m assuming that your macho dishwasher dude can handle the plumbing issue involved in trap-tampering.

Note, too, that the amount of water used doesn’t correspond exactly to the energy consumed, but will give you a rough approximation, because around 60 percent of a dishwashing machine’s total energy use is devoted to heating the water, not to running its motor.

If you do conduct such an experiment, beware the biases that can creep into the process—as they sometimes do in studies funded by various industries to prove that their products are safe and green. Use a realistic number of dishes—dishwashers can hold a lot—and don’t cheat by rinsing so superficially that you leave your dishes less clean than hygienic standards would demand.

In the interest of citizen science, I invite those who carry out this experiment to send me their results.

Which Oil Company is Greenest?

Hey Mr. Green,

What's the greenest oil company now? BP was at the top of your “Pick Your Poison” list as one of the best, but that was in 2007, before its unprecedented disaster in the Gulf.

–Naomi in Allison Park, Pennsylvania

One reason BP had a high rating was that its approaches to alternative energy and climate change were much more pro-environment than other companies. Exxon, for example, lobbied against the Kyoto Protocol and was funding outfits that denied that global warming, while Conoco Phillips opposed caps on greenhouse-gas emissions. (Click here for details.)

Hence BP’s famous mantra, “Beyond Petroleum,” was credible, but obviously the company couldn’t move far enough beyond petroleum, and is now stuck with “Beneath Petroleum" while spewing tens of millions of toxic gallons and counting. It hasn’t just slipped from its pedestal, the pedestal itself has crumbled like a flaming offshore-drilling platform.

Given the situation, Sierra decided not to redo its “Pick Your Poison” ratings, but instead to focus its efforts on a campaign to truly get us beyond petroleum. For more information, and to become involved, click here.

How to Recycle a Stove or Oven

Hey Mr. Green,

Can you please tell me how to recycle a gas range that has served as a stove and an oven?  I've been trying to give it away, but because it requires a lot of repair, nobody wants it. Being the eco-friendly gal that I am, I can't bear the thought of it going into the local dump. Do you have any suggestions?

--Val in Elkhorn, Wisconsin

There are quite a few outfits in your area over near Wisconsin's populous southeast coast that recycle large appliances. So how does an answer guy perched in California know this? Because he went to the premier national resource for finding recyclers, Earth911. All anybody has to do to find local recyclers at Earth911 is type in whatever you want to recycle, plus your address, and a list of recyclers that are closest to you will appear.

If you don’t want to haul the stove to the recycler yourself, you may want to call to find out if they’ll come pick it up.

And yes, you are most assuredly an “eco-friendly gal,” because recycling doesn’t just help keep the dumps from perpetual expansion. Every ton of recycled steel saves 2,500 pounds of iron ore, 1,400 pounds of coal, and 120 pounds of limestone, according to the Steel Recycling Institute. So your old stove can be more cleanly reincarnated, maybe even as an enlightened bicycle, instead of rusting away in a landfill.

How to Find Vehicles That Do Less Damage

Hey Mr. Green,

I drive a Honda Civic coupe, but I am incredibly active outdoors and it’s somewhat difficult to fit all the stuff for my treks into such a small vehicle. Are there any larger vehicles that aren't terribly hurtful to the environment? I also need something that can handle rough dirt roads.

--Dan in Genola, Utah

If you're thinking SUV, some of the hybrid SUVs like Ford’s Escape or Mazda’s Tribute would give you decent gas mileage, though some other hybrids are no easier on the environment than many gas-guzzling conventional SUVs. If space is more of a concern to you than ability to survive on gnarly roads, you might consider some conventional station wagons, too. Audi and Volkswagen have models that get 42 mpg on the highway and 30 mpg in the city. Also, keep in mind that, unlike other vehicles, hybrids usually get better mileage in the city than on the highway, so a hybrid may be a good choice for people who have to do a lot of city driving. For example, the Ford Escape hybrid two-wheel-drive SUV gets 36 mpg in the city and 31 on the road, while Toyota's Highlander hybrid gets 27 mpg in the city and 25 on the highway

You can compare all vehicles of the major manufacturers by going to the EPA's fuel-economy site (sorry, Mr. Green can’t do your homework for you). When you click on any manufacturer, you see the available choices. Another click takes you right to mpg ratings, air pollution scores, and even estimated fuel costs for cars made in recent years, plus mpg ratings going all the way back to 1984, if you’re considering a used model.

Finally, remember that speeding and lousy maintenance can cause any car, no matter how efficient, to burn a whole lot more fuel than it should. So stay under the speed limit and keep your tires properly inflated. For more thorough advice on saving gas, visit the Federal Trade Commission and Natural Resources Canada’s sites. Your tax dollars at work.

Advice About Frosty Appliances

Hey Mr. Green,

I'm shopping around for a more efficient refrigerator. Since I could probably do without a freezer, I'm wondering what would be most efficient: a fridge-only model, a freezer-only model with the thermostat turned way up, a one-door cooler-and-freezer unit, or a two-door unit with the freezer on top.

--Jerry in South Ozone Park, New York

Thanks to toughened federal regulations, modern refrigerators use less than half as much energy as those made 15 years ago. The best place to find the most-efficient models for little or big chills is the EPA's Energy Star site. Simply type in the size and style you're looking for and voila, you get a list of refrigerators that are 10 to 30 percent more efficient than the government's already-strict standard. You'll quickly learn that side-by-side freezer-fridge models are the least efficient. Because freezers are set up to keep things, well, frozen, it might seem like a dicey proposition to turn one into a box to keep your veggies fresh and your beer cool.

However, I found one adventurous tinkerer who rigged his freezer to use a meager 50 kilowatt-hours per year--a fraction of what even the stingiest fridge consumes. He says he accomplished this by replacing the freezer thermostat with one that allows warmer temperatures. I don't recommend such engineering feats to my intelligent but predominantly thermostat-challenged audience, but in the interest of citizen science, I'll refer you to the innovator's findings.

Fishy Claims: Do Marine-Derived Omega-3s Hurt the Ocean?

Hey Mr. Green,

I've heard that omega-3 fatty-acid capsules contain oil from a bottom-dwelling fish that the big supplement companies are fishing into population collapse. Is there any truth to this?

--Eric in Scottsdale, Arizona

There's evidence that omega-3 might help prevent heart problems. Some proponents even claim it staves off dementia, which gives me hope.

But most of the critters used for omega-3 oil are not bottom dwellers; they're smaller fish like anchovies, sardines, mackerel, and menhaden. And if any species, bottom dweller or otherwise, is getting fished into extinction, it's not by the supplement manufacturers. The supplement makers obtain the oil as a byproduct of "reduction fishing"--fishing by outfits whose catch is processed into fish meal, which in turn is fed to farmed fish, chickens, and hogs. (The fact that we roam the seas to net fish to feed other fish and livestock strikes me as one of the screwier aspects of the food system. Why not just eat the smaller fish instead of the farmed salmon that has eaten them? And why not just give livestock homegrown feed?)

Most of the small species caught for fish meal and omega-3 oil aren't endangered, according to the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), but concern about overfishing has led 13 of the 15 Atlantic-coast states to either outlaw menhaden reduction fishing in their waters or ban the gear that's used for this purpose. Unfortunately, proposals to extend the ban on fishing menhaden for feed to all state and federal waters in the Atlantic have failed to get out of congressional committees.

Some fish-oil supplements haven't been adequately screened for mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), although the EDF found that most U.S. producers do remove these toxic substances. To be sure you're getting a safe brand, consult the group's list here.

Accounting for All That Goes Into a Hybrid Car

Hey Mr. Green,

Does your analysis of hybrid cars’ energy use account for all the fuels used in shipping cars and parts to different countries, making the batteries, and so on?

--Branden in Austin, Texas

Yes, the analyses I consulted, such as those from Argonne National Laboratory, include "upstream" and "downstream" inputs to the manufacture, distribution, and disposal, or to use another weary metaphor, “cradle-to-grave inputs.”

Shipping by sea is nowhere near the energy drain some anti-globalist and locavore zealots claim. The amount of energy required even to send a car halfway around the world only amounts to only a tiny fraction of what it’s gonna burn on the road! A huge ship can move more than ton of material 1,000 miles on only a gallon of fuel. The international shipping average is estimated around 422 miles per ton per gallon, and that’s a fairly conservative number because it includes less efficient ships that may well use more fuel that those hauling cars. Like it or not, this is a major reason why multinationals can afford to be multinationals.

Right here on terra firma is where we burn the bulk of our fossil fuel. In fact, of all the cargo shipped by sea, about a third is oil itself, almost all of which is burned by us clueless land-lubbers. People who harp about the evils of long-distance shipping might just be projecting their own local energy waste onto “distant ships sailing into the mist,” as Bob Dylan pictured them in his astoundingly allusive and complex “Jokerman.”

A typical semi truck with a 30-ton load burns about six to eight times more fuel per ton-mile than the biggest cargo ships, but that’s nothing compared to air freight, which can guzzle from 30 to 100 times more fuel per ton-mile as a large ship. Also, a lot of the fuel used in ships, known as "bunker fuel," is actually recycled oil, though this isn’t nearly as environmentally friendly as it sounds. This fuel is, as you can imagine, quite dirty, so the real problem with ships is less energy use than toxic emissions of sulfur, nitrogen oxides, lung-clogging microparticulates, and other pollutants. This is why the International Maritime Organization has begun to take steps to force ships to clean up their emissions near U.S. and Canadian coasts – thanks in large part to a long campaign by our friends at Friends of the Earth.

Finally, to the hybrid-cars battery controversy. There’s been some substantial clouds of blog-fog from chronic hybrid dissers, in which the claim is that it takes more energy to get the nickel for a hybrid’s batteries than a Hummer would burn in its entire supersize life. As I’ve noted, if this were the case, hybrid manufacturers couldn’t even afford the batteries, let alone the whole bleepin’ car, since the Hummer would burn more than $15,000 worth of gas at today’s prices before it hit 100,000 miles. The nickel used to make the batteries is mostly recycled, which requires far less energy than would be needed if it had to be mined and smelted anew.

Dead Wood: Better to Burn, Chip, or Let it Rot?

Hey Mr. Green,

I just bought a farm that had been severely neglected. There are large piles of wood on the property, where fallen trees were cut up and left. What remains are large chunks that would need to be split before they could be burned. Is it better for the environment for me to burn the wood (after getting a burn permit), or to hire a tree service to come and chip it? Obviously, burning is much better for my wallet.

–Carolyn in Hopewell, New Jersey

From a strictly environmental standpoint, if your farm still has some woods, it might be best just to move the dead wood under the trees and let it rot. Dead wood has, um, gained a new lease on life, and is now celebrated as a vital engine of forest ecology. As former U.S. Forest Service chief Jack Ward Thomas said in his Dead Wood: From Forester’s Bane to Environmental Boon, “dying and dead wood provides one of the two or three greatest resources for animal species in a natural forest.”

Dead-wood aficionados seem to revere the dazzling complexity of decay as much they do live trees, and their studies of the intricate relationships of organisms in this long-neglected universe demonstrate just how crucial it is. One treatise, for example, identifies 456 species of animal life in wood and bark where decay has begun. Others delve into details like, “Germination of spores of Glomus macrocarpus (Endogonaceae) after passage through a rodent digestive tract.” Or, “Fungal-small mammal interrelationships with emphasis on Oregon coniferous forests.”

The U.S. Forest Service itself now considers, for example, a northern temperate forest with less than 5 percent woody debris to be in trouble, while a volume of 15 percent debris means it is healthy.

Now if there is no longer any forested space on the property, then I’d default to the chipper, unless that bizarre man-chipping episode in the film classic Fargo has stamped you with uncontrollable Chipper Angst. (Will the fifth edition of the psychiatrists’ Diagnostic and Statistics Manual adds this diagnosis?) The reason to grind up the wood is that at least chipped wood can be useful, whereas simply burning it releases global-warming carbon dioxide and a lot of air pollutants. Of course your tiny little burn would be totally negligible compared to the obscene excess combustion of all the coal-fired power plants and cars in our benighted world, not to mention the collateral damage of streams polluted by mines and the Gulf Coast ruined by oil slicks. But if you aspire to be a complete eco-purist, don’t torch the wood.

Can You Compost Shredded Paper?

Hey Mr. Green,

I shred credit-card statements and other papers containing personal financial information. I usually have a disproportionate amount of green material for my compost, so I'd love to add this shredded paper to the pile.  Is such paper safe for composting?  What about shredded newsprint? 

--Marianne in New York, New York

Except for colored and glossy paper, which might contain some toxic heavy metals, newsprint and other paper is safe to use as mulch or in compost. In fact, one study revealed that paper had less toxic material than straw or grass!

The only problem with paper is that if you put too much of it in your heap, you could get an unfavorable carbon-to-nitrogen ratio, since paper is high in carbon (one reason it burns). But unless your finances are of a Bernie Madoffian level of complexity, your financial documents will probably not disturb the ratio! The ideal ratio is 25 carbon to 1 nitrogen. Too much carbon slows down the process. If that happens, you can always add high-nitrogen material such as grass, alfalfa, or manure. As you no doubt have already discovered, well-chopped material and frequent turning is the key to healthy, happy compost.

To chop up stuff like stems and long grass, I place a cross-sectional slab of a log on an upturned milk crate and mince the material with a machete. Better exercise than cramming it into a chipper, and there's a primal thrill in wielding a machete. Now if you're an inaccurate machete-wielder, I recommend thick gloves to keep from severely injuring the hand that feeds the material onto the slab. If you're a hopelessly inaccurate machete-wielder, you can make a wooden rectangle and attach a side of it to the slab so that you have to feed the stems, etc. through it. This will keep the feeding hand far enough away from the machete to insure safety. (Having grown up in a rural area where more than a few farmers lost fingers, limbs, and life in accidents, I'm a stickler for agricultural safety. And by the way, the agricultural-injury rate is higher than in mining, and while we rightly decry the coal industry for cutting corners on worker safety, the number of fatalities among agricultural laborers is 12 times as high.)

Finally, since you are a composter, let me share a fine poem about composting, which you can read by clicking through the jump. I recommend affixing a copy of it to your compost box for inspiration.

Yes We Can (Rent Solar Panels, That Is)

Hey Mr. Green,

I've heard that there are solar installers who will now lease you the panels for zero down. Is this for real or too good to be true?

--Erica in Berkeley, California

Yes, you can indeed lease solar panels rather than purchase them, which would enable you to go solar without any payment up front. You can also choose to pay considerably less money down than the full purchase price, and lease at a lower monthly rate than if you put no money down. I contacted one of the leasing companies, Solar City, and quickly received a reliable estimate of the solar capacity I’d need based on my annual power consumption.

But before you jump into any solar lease or purchase, you should first see how much you can cut your energy use by taking all my eminently sensible power-miser measures on the Cool Home Checklist here (PDF). Why hive up more solar capacity than you truly need, especially if you’re worried about the price?

Consider this CBS News story about solar leasing that quoted one satisfied customer who slashed her electric bill from $200 to $300 per month to less than $60 per month by paying a $100 per month in solar rent. She enjoys a net savings of between $40 and $140 per month, but since she had “five TVs and four computers” in a suburban home, she might have saved even more by better managing her excess computer and home-entertainment consumption.

Many U.S. households could easily cut their electric use in half—which would help bring U.S. per-capita consumption down to the level of, for example, Germany or Italy. Because increased power consumption jams up the system, power loss between dynamo and user zoomed from 5 percent in 1970 to 9.5 percent by 2001, according to the Department of Energy. In light of such wretched excess, let’s halt dumb use, or the “smart grid” will begin losing IQ points even before it’s built.