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Houses Top Cars as Biggest US Polluters

Think Your Green?

Thought you were being green by driving that new Escape Hybrid and not asking for your receipt at Starbucks? Think again. The Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institute’s recent report on the carbon habits of the US population reports that your house likely contributes more to air pollution then your car.

In the Brooking’s Institute study of green house gas emissions they determined that CO2 Is the most prevalent greenhouse gas, and it primarily comes from the energy used in homes and businesses and not the target of many environmental lobbying groups, transportation. Residential and commercial buildings alone account for 39 percent of all carbon emissions.

What Can You Do?

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

A smart home is a green home. Start looking in your house for ways to go green.

Reduce what you use, and limit buying items in “disposable” containers. Bottles of water are some of the biggest offenders. 1.5 million barrels of oil in the US are used to make water bottles. 86% of these bottles are land filled or incinerated. Bottled water is also shipped by truck, boat and air thus further impacting our environment by the pollution caused by these shipping methods. Water from the tap in most US cities is great, and in some cases better then bottled water. Some bottled waters, most notably Aquafina and Dasani, are bottled directly from municipal water sources! The EPA has laws that regulate the levels of contaminants allowed in drinking water supplied by public water systems, such as public water utility companies ensuring a baseline level of quality, and many municipal water sources exceed these limits. Also, every water utility company is required to provide Consumer Confidence Reports (CCR) to their customers each year. Huntsville’s report is available online at Huntsville Utilities website here. This report provides information on local drinking water quality, including the water’s source, the contaminants and levels found in the water, and how customers can get involved in protecting their drinking water.

Reuse containers and products over and over again. Try to find a novel use for an old product to extend it useful life. CD-Rs as coasters or a baby mobile for instance.

Try to recycle as much as you purchase. Try to give the environment an even swap. Start with recycling household waste. Most communities offer recycling programs for recyclable materials such as plastics and paper. Don’t forget to recycle your old CD-Rs as well. The polycarbonate material in CDs are completely recyclable.

Insulate

According to us department of interior the amount of energy lost due to uninsulated homes is equal to the amount of fuel delivered through the Alaskan pipeline. That is equivalent to 2million barrels of oil per day wasted. This is more oil than is imported from Saudi Arabia daily (1.53 million barrels). In other words we could eliminate a large portion of our foreign oil dependence by simply better insulating our houses.

Adding insulation is a relatively inexpensive way to improve the efficiency of your heating and cooling system. Older houses are in general the worst offenders. Old insulation tends to settle and compact over time. Insulation works by trapping still air in the open spaces in the insulation. Without insulation, air would tend to circulate through the hot or cold attic environment and then skirt next to the drywall covering the ceiling of the conditioned spaces below dumping its heat into or extracting heat away from the drywall barrier. Insulation acts as a barrier to this natural current. It traps still air in the mesh of fiberglass insulation or in the open cells of a foam insulation. This trapped air then reduces the amount of heat that is transferred between these two environments. To have blown in fiberglass or cellulose insulation blown into your attic look at paying anywhere from $.75 to $1 per square foot.

Go Paperless

Commercial and residential paper waste accounts for more than 40% of waste going to the landfill. Eliminating this paper from our waste would nearly double the lives of current landfills.

There are many ways to go paperless in today’s digital economy. One of my favorites as a small businessman is MyFax. I can send and receives faxes all digitally. I never need a fax machine. I can fax a word document as easily as I can print it. I receive faxes in my inbox as a pdf file, and I can even get and send faxes from my PDA.

The average home owner has options as well. Use electronic bill, save a stamp, an envelope, your mail carriers gas, a check, and the hassle of writing it by simply using your bank’s online bill pay system.

Sign up for electronic statements from your cable and utility companies. Also ditch the filing cabinet and save everything on your computer in a neat, organized digital file system.

Want to save a document for future reference? Print to PDF! I use PrimoPDF, a free application which allows you to create a PDF file from any program you can print from. PDFs are compressed and optimized for storage already so they won’t take up much space in your digital file system. Also if you ever need to send anyone a copy of a file, all you have to do is to email it. PDFs are a safe bet to e-mail. For one they are fairly small, and so they transfer quickly. Also they are not usually not filtered by company firewalls, whereas Word, Excel, and jpeg files routinely are.

Lighting Use CFLs and motion detectors. Compact fluorescent light bulbs save about $30 per bulb/ year. Count how many bulbs you have in your house, and that adds up to quite a bit of savings. Add in the fact that approximately 90% of the power consumed by an incandescent light bulb is emitted as heat, rather than as visible light, and then you have to consider how much money is spent cooling a house that is heated by the light bulbs. Motion detectors work well in rooms or walk in closets with high traffic, but a low occupancy rate. Laundry rooms, mud rooms, walk in closets, and to some extent bedrooms can all benefit from a motion detector light switches. These lights switches install in minutes, and can be purchased at your local Wal-Mart or hardware store for about $15 each. They are well worth the money though. I usually place one in any large walk-in closet, the laundry room, especially if it is an anteroom to the garage entrance, and in any room, in which I might enter occasionally, subsequently exit quickly and then typically forget to turn the lights off. Another trick I like to use is to place a pressure sensitive switch in the door frame of non walk-in closets. Use these instead of a typical closet light switch. They also work great on kitchen pantry doors. These pressure switches literally cost about 10 cents, and they are a breeze to install. they work just like the switch that turns your refrigerator light on an off.

There isn’t enough space on my server to list the many many things you can do to go green. The point is to do something. Every little bit helps.