Plug-in hybrid car

I don’t normally get excited by prototype cars, and this one would be too big for me and Dave (SUV size), but I’m really intrigued after reading about it: Turn On, Plug In, Drop Out by Joseph Romm.

It’s a plug-in hybrid car. It has a fast-charge battery that can be charged from your home’s electricity, no petrol needed. The disadvantage of the fast charge time is that it discharges quickly too – 64km (40 miles) of driving will use it up. However, 64km is more than most people drive on an average day. If you do drive further than that, the normal hybrid battery kicks in, so you can just keep going with no problems, filling up with petrol if necessary.

Obviously, if your plug-in car relies on electricity, it’s not that much better for the environment than oil/petrol if your electricity comes from coal. But electricity can come from green sources, while oil can’t, so there’s definitely room for reductions in the greenhouse gas emissions created by cars.

What’s interesting to me is that this isn’t a radical new concept, it’s an incremental improvement on already-proven technology. I reckon frequent small improvements can be taken on quickly by the general population (that’s us), and will get us what we want a lot faster than waiting for a breakthrough in hydrogen vehicles, or a magic bullet solution to the emissions from petrol.

Unfortunately, AFS Trinity is not a car manufacturer – the XH-150 Extreme Hybrid SUV is a retrofit of an existing hybrid SUV, with the help of auto engineers Riccardo. This seems to be the latest in a long line of car ideas that have been prototyped, and very few of those prototypes ever make it to market where people can actually buy them. I’d love to see a car company take AFS Trinity’s idea on: it’s practical and a good halfway-point in the transition to fully electric vehicles.

Joseph Romm wrote an article about it at Salon: The Car of the Future is Here and you can see a video of his test-drive . AFS Trinity has their own videos too.

Quick admin note

My apologies – for the last couple of weeks, comments have been getting stuck in the moderation queue when they should have been posted right away. And at the same time, WordPress decided to stop mailing me when anything requires moderation!

I think it’s ok now, but if your comments don’t appear on the posts, please contact me via email and I’ll look into it.

How to start a vegetable garden

After showing off our vegie garden in the blog the other week, and making all of our visitors come out to take a look at it, I’ve had a few people ask me why we started growing our own vegetables, and if it was very hard to do. Dave and I had been talking about it for years, but when we read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, she made it sound so good that we decided to just get stuck into it.

Step 1: Prepare your soil

One Saturday morning Dave pulled out an old, purple-flowered plant that hadn’t been doing well in the corner of our garden. Then he dug in some of our compost – see Greenfoot’s compost instructions too. We decided that was good enough, but we’re pretty lazy. If you aren’t in a hurry you could also put down some weed mats, or add water-retaining crystals to the soil.

Step 2: Choose your plants

We dithered a bit over which fruit and vegies to try, but it’s a no-brainer really: just choose your favourite foods. I’ve loved beetroots ever since I tried a Jamie Oliver recipe. Supermarket tomatoes taste bland, so I thought we could do better (and we did!). Basil seemed like a good bet to go with tomatoes, and apparently they grow well when planted together. Lemon and limes were an easy choice, since we use lots of lemons (lemon linguine, lemon roast chicken, honey and lemon drinks for winter colds), and Dave and I both like to drink Mojitos. Strawberries were Dave’s choice, since they’re his favourite fruit.

Step 3: Put ‘em in the ground

We picked up the plants from Bunnings and popped them into the ground based on the instructions on the little plant tags. Later, we got some stakes to keep the tomato bushes upright. Add some mulch to keep the moisture in the soil where it belongs – we got a bunch of pea straw from Farmer Jack’s and just kinda spread it around. We put the lemon and lime trees in half-wine-barrels from Waldecks.

Step 4: Maintenance

Perth has water restrictions, so the plants get the regulation 2 days of sprinklers a week. In-between, we sometimes hand-water them after work – and by “we”, I mean “Dave”. When he did the watering, he’d check for any bugs or weeds. Once, there were some bugs on the tomatoes, so Dave used an organic pesticide from Bunnings, and they went away.

That’s pretty much it – so far, everything is doing fine apart from the beetroot, which just didn’t seem to grow much. Peter Cundall from Gardening Australia could point out all sorts of flaws with how we’ve done it (I’m sure he’d want us to use more manure), but I think we learn best by actually doing something, even if we take a few tries to get it right.

Why is growing your own food good for the environment?

By growing some of our own fruit and vegies, we make it easy to reduce the eco-impact of our food: of the 6 ways to make your food eco-friendly, growing your own vegies helps with 5 of them. Food from our backyard is about as local as it gets, we know it’s seasonal because we harvest as soon as things ripen, we control the amount (if any) of pesticides and fertilisers used, there’s no packaging involved, and it motivates us to learn how to cook from scratch. So far we’ve learned mostly about cooking tomatoes (bruschetta, pasta sauce, baked with sausages, in salads, etc), but I’m looking forward to trying new things as we go along.

So if you’re not happy with what’s on offer at your supermarket, dig out a plant in your garden that you don’t like, and stick something tasty in there instead. Water it, stick some mulch on it, and see how it goes

No more plastic bags?

Environment Minister Peter Garrett announced last week that the federal government wants to phase out plastic bags by the end of this year, either through a ban or a levy (putting a price on them). I’m not sure if this just includes supermarket bags, or ones from all shops.

Aussies used 3.92 billion plastic bags in 2005, down from 6 billion in 2002 – this drop has been caused by the promotion of re-useable bags as an alternative. Most of them end up in landfill, but at least 50 million still end up as litter each year.

What’s wrong with plastic bags?

• They’re stupidly ugly
• they take at least 20 years to break down in landfill
• the littered plastic bags can kill sea mammals who accidentally eat them
• we’re given them for free, but the cost is just added into the overheads of shops then passed on to us via increased prices
• 8.7 plastic checkout bags contain enough embodied petroleum energy to drive a car 1 kilometre – is this the best use of a limited resource?
• and apparently there’s a giant floating mass of them in the Pacific Ocean, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, swirled together by the currents (I’ll give a block of organic, fair-trade chocolate as a prize to anyone who can find me a picture of it!).

And yet we’re using them for just a few minutes before throwing them out! Estimates are that only 19% of plastic bags actually get re-used before being thrown out, and only 3% get recycled through supermarket collection.

Some people object to government regulation being used to solve a consumer problem. But if we wait for retailers to decide for themselves to phase them out, I think we’ll be waiting a very long time! We already know they’re wasteful and cause problems – why don’t we just get on with fixing the problem? Surveys show that 87% of Aussies are concerned about the problem of plastic bags, so this seems like an easy win to me.

Other people wonder what they’ll do for bin liners once the plastic shopping bags are gone – won’t we just end up buying plastic bin liners? I can’t speak for everyone, but we buy bin liners and the number we use is far outweighed by the number of shopping bags we’re given when we forget to bring our green reusable bags to the shops. There are biodegradable bin liners available too – they’re not perfect, but they’re better than plastic. And if you compost and recycle properly, there’s a lot less waste to dispose of anyway. Another suggestion I’ve heard is to line your bin with newspaper, but we use the internet instead of buying newspapers as we think they’re a waste of both paper and money

Personally, I think phasing them out is a good idea. I don’t mind a ban, but putting a price on them would also work by making people think about whether they really need one or not.

If such different places as Ireland (90% reduction in 5 months using a 15c tax), San Francisco (banned after a voluntary scheme for retailers failed), and Taiwan (3c charge per bag, and a fine for places giving them away for free) can all cope without plastic bags, surely we can figure it out without too much fuss. 13 Australian towns have already phased out plastic bags so it’s easy to imagine the rest of us doing it too.

Planet Ark is actively campaigning against plastic bags, and has a bunch of handy resources you can use, including Frequently Asked Questions about plastic bags and Find out where to recycle your plastic bags.

Chill my ride

A while ago I posted about Browne’s “Chill My Ride” competition where you could win a Hummer. A few people who read my post contacted Browne’s parent company Fonterra to complain about this. Eloise Dortch (read my interview with her here) received a reply to her letter from Paul Murphy, their Marketing Manager for Fresh Dairy. Eloise and Paul have agreed to let me show you some of what they wrote.

When Eloise wrote to complain, she said that although she was a long-term customer of Brownes because it’s a local business, she didn’t like the current “win a Hummer” promotion. She explained why Hummers are bad for the environment, providing facts and figures.

“Perhaps you heard that Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California, recently got rid of his Hummer? That was because a Hummer emits an average 11 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions each year. This is nearly three times as much as the average small car. Or put it another way: 11 tonnes-a-year compares to 14 tonnes-a-year that the Federal Government says Australians currently emit per person. Imagine what would happen to our total emissions if we all drove Hummers.”

She then went on to say that she would reconsider her boycott if the promotion was ended.

Paul Murphy replied that Fonterra, as one of Australia’s leading dairy companies, was aware of the environmental problems caused by greenhouse gas emissions, and had been working on improving the issue for some time. From his letter:

During the period 1998 to 2006, Fonterra has achieved a 21 per cent reduction in the total amount of carbon emissions from its dairy operations (approx 78,000 tonnes per annum).”

Fonterra participated in the original Greenhouse Challenge program established in 1995 – this was a voluntary program, and many companies didn’t do much after joining. I think a 21% reduction in emissions represents a serious effort. He went on to say:

I apologise if our ‘Chill my Ride’ promotion appears to indicate that we are not sensitive to environmental issues. Your feedback certainly prompts us to be more thoughtful when developing promotions in the future.”

Eloise replied:

“A cut in emissions of 21 per cent over nine years for such an energy-intensive industry is reasonably impressive. However such a simple thing as this poorly-considered promotion has for me undone any good that such environmental policies achieved for your company’s image. To quote a friend who saw your response: “Being good in one area doesn’t give them license to be bad in another.” “

Like Eloise, I’ll be boycotting Brownes while this promotion is running, and if they choose to do anything similar in future. This promotion is irresponsible and undoes the good work put in by many people to raise awareness of the problems caused by the pollution from our cars (or our enormous ego-substitutes, depending on what you drive).

However, one of my additional reasons for not buying their products anymore was that I found out that Brownes was no longer a locally-owned business. As regular readers will know, eating locally is one way to reduce your eco-footprint.

But while I was emailing Paul about this article, he mentioned that although Fonterra owned Brownes, Brownes products are still made from milk from WA farmers, and are still produced here in WA. This meets my own requirements for local food: although I’d prefer to see the profits stay in WA, keeping the source food and production local means that (for Perth residents at least) Brownes is still a lower-impact option compared to eastern states brands.

I hope in the future that Fonterra will make sure it’s marketing is in line with it’s day-to-day efforts to have less impact on the environment. This is why I think that it’s always worth the effort to write a letter to a company whose operations you disagree with: you never know what you might learn, and you might get them to reconsider their decisions.