My Daily Impact, October 20 - 26, 2011

This is the 31st posting to this blog.

I did it again. I let a week go by between postings. This is not nescesarily a bad thing, but small things that I do on a daily basis slip through the cracks. There are the paper towels in the wash rooms, the broken plastic utensils, the napkins, the sugar packets, the meat, and all of the frozen food that I find so convenient.

Let's start with frozen food. I use frozen, concentrated orange juice, and drink a glass full every morning. I eat frozen veggies about 4 times per week, and I ate frozen fish three times over the past week. All of this food must be transported and stored frozen, and this uses a lot of electricity and fuel. I do not know what the difference is in transporting frozen over dry or canned goods is, but I know that there is a difference. At least the frozen OJ reduces the transport of cold water in regular OJ, and it reduces the packaging as well.

I have mentioned meat before in this blog. Besides the fact that the cow, pig, lamb, or chicken must die, there is the feeding, grazing land ( hopefully ), and the poop. There is also the cold storage energy, and all of this adds up to a lot of impact. One of the most environmentally friendly things to do is to become a vegitarian. I attempt to be at least a part-time vegitarian, but I still have that carnivore side. Meat intake this past week involved some of those bacon-wrapped fillets, which I served at a small dinner party, two Wendy's singles, 6 slices of Ikea bacon, that frozen fish, and small ammounts of chicken from Sweet Tomatoes' salad and soup bar.

There have been some improvements lately. I went to Clemmon's produce, and bought some locally-grown oranges and tomatoes. They clearly label all of their produce with the place of origin. I would really like Publix to do the same thing. I know that Publix does label some things, but it would be nice to highlight local produce.

Power use from the grid continues to be low this month. There were several overcast days until the 21st when I had to use more from the power company than usual. Since then, the only grid use was to cook, and to do two loads of laundry. I was able to line dry most of the wash, and therefore only used 9 KWh for the whole week. Just using the dryer for those two loads would have accounted for most of those nine.

I started construction of my next solar project yesterday. The mad scientist is back at work, and details with pictures will follow on new postings. Until then, be as green as possible!