Green Drinks reminder!

This Tuesday the Perth Green Drinks are on again, organised by the lovely Wilma We’ll be at the Claremont Pub from 6pm, and there’ll be a couple of short talks: Wilma is telling us about Scoodi, and Alex is telling us about the Somerville Eco Village project.

If you’re not in Perth, see if there are any Green Drinks events happening near you. I don’t always have the time to go, but every time I’ve been I’ve had a lot of fun. It’s good to chat with likeminded people, and I always find out about some new green venture that’s getting started.

How to reduce the chemicals in your home

How do you clean your house? If you’re like most people, you use sprays to clean your benchtops, sprays for your windows, sprays for your mirrors, some liquids for your floors. If you’re like me, you probably use an oven cleaner reluctantly – I’ve never seen one that didn’t require a complete airing of the house after it’s been opened. Maybe you’ve got a few hard-core grime removers for things like mold or calcium stains in the bathroom.

I used to have the full range of chemical bombardment cleaners in the house too. Now, I’ve gotten rid of most of them – I’ve switched to microfibre cloths. It’s worked out really well for me: no peeling skin on my hands (I’m sensitive to the chemicals), no money spent on new sprays every few weeks, no time spent wondering how to recycle the empty containers. When I need to clean something a bit out of the ordinary (like the toothpaste mess David leaves all over the sink), I tackle it with baking powder and vinegar first, then finish up with the cloths. I find it faster to clean with them too, which is a bonus because I enjoy.. well, pretty much anything, really, more than I enjoy cleaning

The microfibre cloths create a static attraction when they’re dry, which picks up dust and loose dirt. When you wet them, they use capillary force to suck greasy dirt up into the cloth, which is only released when you wash it with laundry powder or liquid (like shampooing your hair). They don’t leave any dirt behind, or a chemical residue either.

They have huge environmental benefits:

• fewer plastics used for spray bottles and disposable sponges, which is great since plastic is made by burning oil
• fewer plastics left in landfill for years to come – not all of them can be recycled, and the recycling is energy intensive too
• less water used to get things clean, very important in Australia right now
• less pollution inside your home, or released to the atmosphere, caused by airborne particles of the cleaning chemicals
• less chemicals washed down your drains, which have to be processed out

For the last few years, I’ve been using the microfibre cloths I got from the supermarket, and they’ve mostly been great. However, my kitchen and bathroom mitts wore out very quickly. On the weekend, I went to an Enjo demonstration at my sister’s house. I wanted to see if Enjo products are better than the ones I had, and if the company’s reputation for being environmentally friendly lived up to our standards.

The demo was fun, and we all had a turn at using the cleaning mitts. The demonstrator explained how the microfibre works, how to clean your cloths and use them properly. The quality of the mitts is better than the ones I’d tried before – they seem sturdier and easier to use. There’s a range of products for each room of the house, but I suspect that’s so that they can sell more, rather than because the kitchen mitt is vastly different from the bathroom mitt.

Enjo has embraced being environmentally friendly. They show buyers how to care for the cloths so that they last as long as possible, and take your used cloths back for recycling. They show you how to use the smallest amount of water to clean with, and suggest you switch your other cleaning products (laundry powder, dishwashing liquid) to low-phosphate types. There’s no fancy plastic or cardboard packaging to throw out. I’d like to see them switch to recycled paper in their brochures and paperwork, as they seem to go through a lot, and describe the eco-benefits on the website. But the owner of the business has become one of Al Gore’s Climate Change Ambassadors, which I think shows a commitment to the cause, and I expect that in future they’ll introduce more eco-friendly changes to how they run things.

So now, the important factor: how much do they cost? The Enjo cloths and other items were all expensive, about $30-$40. My supermarket brands had cost about $10 for a similar product. Cleaning sprays usually cost under $10, but you need to buy them frequently. Anyone who’s bought Tupperware or compact fluorescent lightbulbs understands the decision to pay more up-front for a quality product that will last for a long time, replacing other more disposable products you might have chosen. And the environmental benefits are significant. However, if you’re not sure if microfibre cloths are for you, there’s no reason you shouldn’t try out a cheaper brand from the supermarket before spending the big bucks on Enjo.

I’ve bought the kitchen pack from Enjo. I’m going to try to clean the oven as instructed, and if it works then I can finally throw that stinky oven bomb spray out

Have your say on the Garnaut Climate Change Review

The Garnaut Climate Change Review is releasing it’s draft report on 30th June. If you live in a capital city on the mainland, you can attend a public forum to have your say about it. Professor Garnaut will be travelling around the country from the 7th to the 11th of July to host community discussions about the report. Individuals and organisations are encouraged to attend, but if you can’t, you can email or write in with your comments.

Each forum is held in the city’s town hall, from 10:00am to 11:30am. The dates are:

• Perth 7th July
• Adelaide 8th July
• Melbourne 9th July
• Sydney 10th July
• Brisbane 11th July

If you’re interested, you can register to attend through the review website.

The Garnaut review is the only independent study about the impacts of climate change that’s focusing on the Australian economy, and will be making recommendations about long-term policies and frameworks for Australia. I’d love to go to one of these forums, to see how it’s shaping up, but after taking a day off work to go to the Water Forever workshop I don’t think I can manage another day off so soon! If you do go, let me know if you’d like to write a guest post to share with the rest of us how it went.

Rapid decline in Arctic ice

On Tuesday, Brian from Larvatus Prodeo posted 7 graphs showing the incredibly rapid decline in Arctic ice last year. It beats all other extremes that have been recorded already, and shows how close we are to the point of no return.

Scientists previously predicted that the Arctic ice-cap would be no longer there during summertime by 2040, but have now revised that date to 2012. When it’s gone, we’re looking at faster sea-level rises and changed weather patterns with a knock-on effect around the world.

I was struck by the comment from one of the NASA climate scientists, Jay Zwally, as quoted in the National Geographic article Arctic Sea Ice Gone in Summer Within 5 Years (and quoted by Brian as well)

“The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming,” said Zwally, who as a teenager hauled coal. “Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines.”

Brian’s article Trouble at the top of the world shows just how bad the damage is getting. He’s going to post more articles explaining the issue, and is encouraging people to send them to any policy-makers they know. Please read it, and send a link to it to anyone who you think needs to know more about what’s going on.

What is geosequestration?

One of the major items on our government’s list of “Things to Do to Help the Environment” is paying for more carbon sequestration experiments. In the recent budget, they allocated $500 million towards research into ‘clean’ coal. But what is it, exactly?

Carbon sequestration is also known as geosequestration or carbon capture and storage (I prefer the last name, because it’s easier to spell!). The idea is to figure out how to capture the carbon being emitted, transform it into a liquid or gas which can be easily stored, then find a suitable underground area to put it in, where it will hopefully stay without harming the environment around it. You can see how they’re planning on doing it in this pdf file on Carbon Capture from CO2CRC, the company leading the research in Australia.

Currently they’re working on an experimental sequestration project in the Otway basin in Victoria. This will pump 100,000 tonnes of naturally-occurring carbon dioxide into a natural reservoir 2km underground, to see if it stays there once they put it there. Unfortunately, even if this project goes exactly to plan, it would be at least 5 to 10 years before it would be available commercially (opponents say it might be as long as 20 years). And as reported in the Age, it can’t even be retro-fitted to our older power stations like Hazelwood.

Then we face the problem of where we’re going to store this stuff. At the moment, over 80% of Australia’s electricity comes from coal-fired power plants. With over 200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide produced annually, that’s a lot of liquid or gas to find a new home for. CO2CRC has a pdf map of possible sites in Australia but it’s unlikely that all of them will be suitable. Another research project in Kwinana has been cancelled because the geological formations were found to have gas ‘chimneys’ that would allow the gas to escape.

Other demonstration projects have been cancelled recently in Norway and the UK, as they were considered too expensive. A US project has had it’s government funding cancelled as well due to cost blow-outs.

It makes you wonder why we’re spending half our money for eco-friendly energy on carbon capture and storage. It seems like a slow, expensive way to support a dying industry. I’d prefer to see all the research money go to renewables research, which only got the same $500 million to divide among individual technologies like solar, wind and geothermal.

Obviously the coal companies would like to get rid of the carbon-dioxide they put out instead of putting it into our atmosphere, since that would let them carry on with business as usual. But the coal industry is made up of enormous companies posting huge profits: if they want to stay the preferred energy source, isn’t it up to them to meet our new, cleaner standards? Why are we paying for their research?

Carbon storage may be necessary though: even if we stop getting our energy from coal-fired power plants relatively soon, we may still need to scrub the existing carbon emissions out of the atmosphere. If so, we’ll need a safe place to put them, and I haven’t heard any better ideas yet