A Down-To-Earth Question About Carpets

Hey Mr. Green,

Where can I find information about purchasing replacement carpeting that is environmentally responsible and nontoxic?

--Donna in Ocala, Florida

Finding the most environmentally magic carpet can take a bit of digging but it's worth it. I recommend taking the following steps:

1) Make sure your prospective carpets, carpet pads, and adhesives carry the Green Label Plus logo of the Carpet and Rug Institute. This certification helps ensure that carpets and installation materials meet low-emissions standards. If you've ever been exposed to noxious, dizzying fumes from carpet installations, you'll know why this is important.

2) Look for carpets and pads that are blessed with the highest post-consumer recycled content and recovered materials content (recovered materials are those recycled with the manufacturing process). The Carpet and Rug Institute provides links to help you assess individual manufacturers here.

3) If you're thinking about replacing an old carpet, consider the possibility of giving it a new lease on life by refurbishing it or re-dying it or both. If it's too far gone for such remedies, make sure it's recycled after you rip it out. Only 10 percent of old carpets get recycled. A depressing 2.5 million tons of it gets squished down into U.S. landfills every year, instead of being resurrected as composite lumber, tile backer board, roofing shingles, railroad ties, automotive parts, stepping stones, and so on. You can find carpet-recycling information at the Carpet America Recovery Effort’s Web site, and at Earth911. For more intriguing information about carpets and their destiny, click here.

4) Institute a shoes-off-in-the-house rule. This will extend a carpet’s life and reduce its need for cleaning.

Biodegradable Plastics: Panacea or Put-On?

Hey Mr. Green,

I think that your column’s recent stance on biodegradable cups is all wrong. Not only is compostability important, but being nontoxic in our municipal landfills and incinerators is a real plus. If you knew about the island of plastic that is floating around in the Pacific then you might have reasoned that if we used bioplastics instead of Styrofoam and other plastic disposables, it wouldn't be there threatening marine life and everything else daily.

Of course people should use reusable containers but in the modern world that is not always an option. Give some credit to technological developments that try to bring about greener alternatives to the worst petroleum-based environmental offenders. 

--Stephen in York, Pennsylvania

"Biodegradable" has acquired such solemn meaning that you now hear the word uttered with prayerful reverence. But look, just because something's biodegradable doesn't make it entirely virtuous. Charlie Manson is biodegradable, Richard Nixon is biodegrading, and Nero and Caligula and Attila the Hun have no doubt biodegraded to the point to which some of their molecules could be zipping around in the organic coffee that just fueled this overwrought sentence.

I did not actually take a pro or con stance on biodegradable plastics. Rather, I expressed skepticism about whether they are as environmentally benign as some folks believe. I'd like to be convinced that they don't use more energy or cause more pollution than other plastics, but I haven't seen the evidence.

Some types of biodegradables may generate higher net levels of greenhouse-gas emissions, atmospheric acidification, and eutrophification, while some may reduce it. But even the researchers who find reductions in emissions because of the use of these materials have cautioned that other problems may arise. In fact, some studies show that biodegradables don't even biodegrade unless placed in commercial composting systems. So people blithely chucking out biodegradables believing that it's OK might be harming wildlife. Adding to the question’s complexity is the reality that there are different kinds of biodegradables, making it even more difficult to reach a conclusion.

Regarding landfills, they are actually designed to prevent material from breaking down in them, so neither kind of plastic can claim moral superiority once it's interred.

I have two other compelling reasons for skepticism about giving "credit to technological developments.” One is expressed in the old axiom: "Reduce, reuse, and recycle." It's always best to attempt to reduce first, for obvious reasons. Touting biodegradability as a miracle solution can distract us from what is by far the most effective measure, which is to reduce use. To our great peril, we continue to ignore the basic principles of conservation of resources, partly because of our distracting infatuation with technological fixes. In other words, don't wait until you can afford solar panels to turn out the bleepin' lights.

Secondly, I'm old enough to remember when pesticides and nuclear power and all manner of synthetic materials were touted as wondrous instruments of progress. While the relentless march of time is in most respects a fairly miserable experience, it does reinforce a healthy skepticism known as the precautionary principle. The irony of the word "plastics," as whispered to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, is much more compelling than it was 40-odd years ago.

Just Do It. (Recycle, That Is.)

Hey Mr. Green,

What do I do with my old stuff, like used shoes? I hate the thought of filling our landfills if my junk can be someone else's treasure. How do I learn what can be reused or recycled and where to send unwanted items?

--Kirstin in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin

My favorite resource for information about recycling almost anything is Earth 911. You specify what you want to recycle, type in your ZIP code, and get the location nearest you.

Regarding footwear, there are an estimated 1.5 billion pairs of unworn shoes languishing in U.S. closets—enough, maybe, for the most desperate shopaholic, or all the world's shoeless. But there are plenty of organizations that recycle them, including Soles4Shoes, which takes all types of "gently worn" shoes. For women's shoes, there's SimplySouls. For sports shoes only, there's Nike—but don't let its recycling program convince you that Nike is environmentally innocent, and don't get all utopian about recycling, as Sole4Soles does with its slogan "Changing the world, one pair at a time," or SimplySouls'  "Saving the Earth, one shoe at a time." It's gonna take a bit more effort than basking in the glow of a recycling ritual to fix the environment.

Nike takes worn-out athletic shoes and grinds them into Nike Grind,  which sounds like runner’s boredom but is actually a substance used in those cushiony athletic surfaces. Critics charge that while Nike has made some improvements since the 1990s, it dumps or burns scrap rubber in Indonesia—and that laborers in Nike and other shoe and sportswear factories in Asia lack the right to organize, are fired for union activity, and cheated out of pay. See, for example, this site or this one. Since Nike itself admits that there are still problems,  it wouldn't hurt to remind the company to try harder to solve them.

How to Recycle Propane Canisters for Camp Stoves?

Hey Mr. Green,

I have been trying to find out how best to dispose of or recycle the small propane canisters that we use for our camp stove (the green ones a bit fatter than the size of a jar of pasta sauce). Even our local hardware store didn't seem to know. Do you know?

–Donna in San Francisco

Until very recently, it was impossible to recycle those old canisters for the simple reason that nobody wanted to risk having the gas left in them blowing up or starting a fire. But now—good news for campers—you can heat up the pasta sauce at your campsite and enjoy it even more. Coleman, a major manufacturer of canisters, has introduced a "Green Key" canister. The green key that comes with the canister allows you to make sure all the remaining gas is expelled, thereby averting disaster and making it safe to recycle. To find the nearest recycler that takes them, go earth911.com, follow their instructions, typing in "steel" and your ZIP code.

Thoroughly Exhausted by Smog Test

Hey Mr. Green,

I just waited in line at the DMV to get my car's emissions tested. It took about 20 minutes. Plus, the closest inspection site was 15 miles from my house. As we sat there idle and idling, I wondered whether it wouldn't be better for the air just to eliminate the emissions inspections. Now that most cars are relatively cleaner than they were back in the '70s, how many polluting cars do these inspections take off the road each year, compared to the impact of having every car in the state drive to an inspection station and sit idling for 20 minutes?

–Allen in Potomac, Maryland

First, I hope you weren’t idling while you were in the line, and that you are referring to the idling that was done while the car was being tested. As I’ve noted before, idling is a no-no.

I haven’t been able to determine the national total flunked clunkers taken off the road because of smog tests, but it’s clearly substantial. In California, for example, from 2000 to 2003, more than 20,000 vehicles that failed tests were officially retired in buyback programs. The actual number taken off the road had to have been far greater, because this figure only represents owners who actually bothered to go through the rather bureaucratic buyback process.

Yes, huge progress has been made in cutting air pollution from cars. Thanks to EPA rules, a big drop in deadly emissions occurred between 1970 and 1997, and they’re being further decreased by the implementation of new restrictions set during the Clinton administration. We can all breathe easier, literally, because the coalition of the greedy who wrecked our economy with deregulation schemes didn’t manage to kill our environmental rules—though some of their libertarian/free-market intellectual whores whipped up many specious arguments for doing precisely that.

But in wondering if the air is half-full or half-empty, keep in mind that the net reduction of auto pollution isn’t as great as may first appear. One reason, as I’ve noted before, is that we now have 115 million more cars and SUVs on the road than in 1970, and we drive them 2,400 miles farther each year, burning 40 billion more gallons of fuel in them. Therefore, many gains have been offset by the sheer increase in the number of vehicles. Yes, we succeeded in reducing dangerous small particles (soot, basically) by 75 percent, and we brought down some other nasty pollutants by more than 30 percent (though nitrogen oxide actually increased). The heftiest and certainly healthiest reduction of a serious poison came when the government flat-out banned lead additives from gasoline, which helped bring emissions from this brain-damaging heavy metal down from 220,000 tons to only 5,000 tons per year.

Finally, not only are there millions of clunkers still on the road that should be sent to recycling heaven, but even state-of-the-art pollution-control devices can and do fail, as can any technology. So all things considered, for the time being, I consider smog tests well worth the effort.

A Styrofoam Quandary

Hey Mr. Green,

My wife and I try to minimize our purchases and we recycle or reuse everything possible (cardboard boxes, packing paper, and so on). But with Styrofoam, the trade name for expanded polystyrene (EPS), we’ve hit a wall. We don't have a local recycling program, and there is no local demand for this material. So we’re approaching critical mass because we won’t dispose of it until we can find an environmentally sound way to do so. There are mail-back programs that require packing up the EPS and mailing it to a manufacturer who does accept it. So I have two questions: 1) Does it make environmental sense to mail Styrofoam to manufacturers who will use it (I would consider the postage costs as an acceptable additional cost of purchases)? 2) Would it be safe, wise, and environmentally feasible to reuse EPS as attic insulation in its packing form?

–Name and location undisclosed

It makes some sense to ship Styrofoam peanuts to a recycler, or to drop it off at any local company (if you happen to be going near the place) that does lots of shipping and requires packing material. Unfortunately, consumers are recycling only about 3 percent of the good, clean packaging. It’s extremely difficult to recycle Styrofoam food containers because of contamination, which is why some cities have banned them. To find out where to send or drop off the loose peanut packaging, go to this link or call the Plastic Loose Fill Council’s “peanut hotline” at (800) 828-2214. For rigid package recycling, go to this link. Also check Earth911.

I'll spare you some of the math and boil it down to this: It takes about 45,000 British thermal units (Btus) to make a pound of Styrofoam, or about a third as much energy as in a gallon of diesel fuel, which has roughly 130,000 Btus per gallon. Since Styrofoam is very light, only 5 percent as heavy as water, it takes a lot of room. This light weight is what makes it such a fantastically efficient shipping material in the first place. A typical big rig semi can haul 60,000 pounds. Cram it with Styrofoam instead of, say, bottled water, and it can only haul 3,000 pounds max. So, at 45,000 Btus per pound, it took about 135,000,000 Btus to make that 3,000-pound load. Since diesel fuel contains 130,000 Btus, that's 135,000,000 / 130,000 = 1,038 gallons worth of diesel fuel in the load. Since a big rig gets around 5 miles per gallon (and obviously more when pulling a light load), recycling would yield a net gain in energy, unless the Styrofoam was being hauled 10,000 miles or so, which seems rather unlikely. If the haul is 500 miles, then it only takes 100 gallons of fuel for a load that took the equivalent of 960 gallons to make.

Of course, this is an oversimplified, best-case scenario, because 1) You probably can’t get 3,000 pounds on a load because of cavities, and 2) it doesn't account for the energy consumed at the recycling facility. But then again, if your Styrofoam were tossed in the garbage, energy would also be required to haul it to a landfill.

Regarding your question about reusing Styrofoam as insulation, as a dumpster-diving cheapskate scavenger, I’d love to be able recommend that, but even I can’t go that far. It’s combustible, and I would just hate to see your conscientious recycling efforts—and your house—go up in literal flames. Besides, sneaking it in between the ceiling joists would probably violate building codes. Granted, Styrofoam is a darn good insulator, as anybody knows who’s ever wrapped their hand around one of those stupid coffee cups that get tossed by the billions. In fact, it’s quite a bit better per inch of thickness than many other kinds of insulation, which is why they mold it into those sheets used for insulation. But these incarnations of Styrofoam are made fire-resistant, unlike those mysteriously sculpted white forms used to encase everything from pens to pendants to pistols.

Don’t Smash That Thermostat!

Sometimes Mr. Green gets a rant worth quoting at length, especially if it reinforces his own skepticism about substituting technology for common sense. Here goes:

Hey Mr. Green,

You recently mentioned various energy–conservation projects, one being to install a programmable thermostat. Well, yes, they may work for some people, but the one we had was without a doubt the sorriest piece of electrical equipment ever to deface an innocent wall.

Our coldest and most miserable winter in more than 50 years was caused by that savage little monstrosity in the downsized house we moved into. Being retired, we aren't robots on a rigid schedule, and didn't need any fool computer telling us when to turn on the furnace. However, instructions in hand, we humored that idiotic device, trying to move it down from 72º to a more reasonable, lower figure in winter, but it popped right back up. Nothing we did to this instrument of the devil, this Rasputin, or maybe Cheney, would help. We ended up turning it on when the house got cold and shutting it off when it warmed up. A pair of bare wires and a clothespin would have accomplished the same thing.

Finally we bought a real thermostat like the one we had in our other house for 40 years. All we have to do is rotate it one way to warm up the place, and turn it the other way to cool it down—the very epitome of simplicity and efficiency. No goofy buttons, no failed attempts to coordinate time and temperature, and no waste of natural gas.

So, after our experience, whenever someone comes around with "programmable thermostat" I start thinking of getting out my heaviest hammer and gleefully smashing that electronic monstrosity to bits.

–Tom (location undisclosed)

Tom, I share your antagonism toward gadgetry, but millions of folks are so “distracted from distraction by distraction,” as T.S. Eliot put it long ago, that they simply can’t focus on mundane tasks like adjusting the thermostat. It was mainly for these unfortunate victims of the economic system and the false gods of digital technology that I prescribed the programmable thermostat. Personally, I consider these and many other energy gadgets to be the moral equivalent of overmedication. If you live sensibly, you won’t need most of those remedies advertised on TV to keep your bladder happy and your legs from involuntary twitching.

But don’t go gleefully hammering your old thermostat—or any used thermostat. Recycling well is your best revenge. Find out where to do so by contacting your local waste-management authorities or locate nearest thermostat recycler at earth911.com.

And if you know anybody who has one of those older thermostats that might contain mercury, implore them not to smash or discard the device, but recycle it. Last year 1,300 pound of toxic mercury were contained by the recycling of 100,000 old thermostats.

People who still get their knickers in a knot about the minute amount of mercury in fluorescent lightbulbs should note: Those 100,000 thermostats contain as much of the toxic metal as 118 million fluorescent bulbs, or a roughly a bulb for every U.S. household.

Numbers to Get Others on the Bandwagon

Hey Mr. Green,

If you carpool to work, recycle and compost, ride a bike often instead of taking a car, turn off lights and electronic devices, don’t leave the water running when brushing your teeth, use reusable cups and plates instead of disposable ones, buy local organic products, and buy energy-efficient appliances, how do you tally that in trees saved or wildlife saved? I need to show the employees at my organization how much a few small actions can change the world for the better. I would like to use figures or stats to do so. Can you help?

–Ellen in Denver, Colorado

That’s a mighty tall and comprehensive order, but here goes: Regarding trees and paper, each person in the United States uses around 660 pounds of paper a year. Assuming the oft-cited 17 trees per ton of paper, this translates into about 1.2 billion trees that could be saved if everybody recycled. Of course, a lot of trees are already being saved because 57 percent of paper is already being recycled.
To be fair, I should point out that there are contrarians who claim recycling actually reduces the total number of trees because it increases paper supply, thereby reducing the economic incentive to plant more trees for pulp.

Regarding energy reduction, the average per-capita carbon dioxide emission in the United States is more than 20 tons per year. If your colleagues cut their energy use in half, which is easily doable by following your advice, they would make a huge reduction in this dreary exhalation, this sigh of a tired and clueless economy. Take the example of cars alone. We now burn about 140 billion gallons of gasoline in our cars per year. If everybody cut their automobile use in half by carpooling and biking, that’s at least 70 billion gallons saved, or 700 million carbon tons kept out of the air.

They’d also save a lot of money. The average car goes about 12,000 miles per year. If it gets 25 miles per gallon, that’s $1,440 at $3 per gallon. If people can get by without a car, they save much, much more, from $5,500 to $9,100 per year, since the cost of owning and operating a vehicle is 55 cents per mile for a small sedan driven 10,000 miles, and 91 cents a mile for an four-wheel-drive SUV.

The number of trees and creatures saved from this reduction is hard to determine, since we don’t yet know what effect global warming will have on populations of flora and fauna. But it sure would cut roadkill rates in half, which by some estimates nails about 1 million deer, 1 million small mammals, and probably many more birds than that (I can’t comment on reptile-and-amphibian mashing, as these are underrepresented in our mammal-centric studies.) Maybe the animal-rights guys should lay off the hunters and focus their efforts on Bambi-slamming cars instead.

As for buying organic, that will obviously reduce pollution because organic products don’t use chemical poisons or fertilizers. This is a very welcome development for wildlife, though it’s hard to get an estimate on how much of it would be saved by detoxifying our agriculture. But when you consider that hundreds of millions of pounds of pesticides are dumped on corn and soybeans alone, and that organic farming reduces this to zero, the benefits are obvious.

Generally speaking, buying local reduces the energy involved in shipping food long distances, but this is very difficult to quantify because of differences in the efficiency of local farmers’ vehicles and the amount they haul per trip. But in many cases, it probably takes less energy to move a tomato 20 miles instead of 2,000.

Flourescent Lightbulbs: A Bright Idea?

Hey Mr. Green,

In the past few years we've been encouraged to replace incandescent lamps with fluorescents. It makes sense, because the fluorescent takes only 25 percent as much as energy to operate.  But an incandescent bulb is relatively simple in that a thin tungsten wire is its light source, whereas a fluorescent lamp is far more complex requiring a very high voltage starter and a complex, coated tube. The extra materials needed (including mercury) never seem to be mentioned in bulb comparisons that discuss only fluorescent wattage. So I wonder whether fluorescent bulbs are really as energy-efficient as they seem.

–Bob in Tustin, California

Inquisitive folks like you have begun wondering about the total environmental impact of a given product, including the hidden costs. These questions can be very complicated and difficult to answer. In the bulb world, the answers are harder to find than usual because of manufacturers' reluctance to share information with us media dimwits.

But some life-cycle-analysis researchers have managed get a good look at the energy impacts of making bulbs. Fluorescents do require more energy to make, but still come out way ahead in net energy savings; only about 7 percent of the total energy used by a fluorescent over its life is consumed in manufacturing and other processes. Less than 1 percent of this is needed to make incandescents. But since, as you point out, fluorescents use only 25 percent as much energy to operate, so they still come out much more efficient even when you add in that extra 7 percent.

Regarding mercury, it's the source of a lot of confusion and controversy about fluorescent lights. You do need to recycle your fluorescent lamps when they perish because they do contain a small amount of mercury. Granted, even if all household bulbs were fluorescent and all of them ended up getting smashed, the net emissions would still amount to only about 6 percent of the mercury emitted by coal-burning power plants. That said, however, no amount of mercury is safe. For a comprehensive look at how to recycle fluorescent lightbulbs, go to lamprecycle.org.

An Oily Situation

Hey Mr. Green,
What’s the best way to dispose of expired vegetable and olive oils?  I have a couple of bottles that are more than two years old and it doesn't seem like a good idea to pour them down the drain, but they are full so I don't want to put them in the garbage either. –Terri in Glenview, Illinois

From a plumbing perspective (as a side note, I think plumbing is one of the greatest accomplishments in human history), it's always a bad idea to pour oil down the drain. From a composting perspective, I'd hate to see even a drop your old oil added to the staggering 29 million tons of food waste that ends up in the landfill each year. 

"Reduce, reuse, recycle" is the old eco-adage, and “reuse” would apply in your situation. Vegetable oils make good protectants and lubricants, so you can deploy them to polish furniture or silverware, oil squeaky hinges, protect and preserve metal and wood on garden and other tools, oil shoes and kids' baseball gloves and wooden bats, and lube some mechanical devices, though bicycle purists don't recommend it and I'm not sure these oils have the right properties for maintaining guns.

You can even use some vegetable oils to make soap and beauty products. Olive oil in particular has been used for skin and hair protection since ancient times. When those biblical prophets say, “thou annointest me," they're talking olive, not soy, canola, or corn. However, I wouldn't go rubbing on old, rancid oil, or using it for any of the numerous personal-lubricant purposes that you may have heard of. Even if all of these uses were safe--and I'm not sure they are--the odor might well preclude the desired results.

Finally, you could find out whether you can recycle cooking oils as biodiesel by checking that great recycling resource, Earth911.com. Actually, I just checked it for you. The nearest place that takes cooking oil is about 40 miles from your town, in Crest Hill. But it's obviously not worth a special trip.