Scientists stumbled upon another possible global warming feedback as they were tracing the “life” of a giant iceberg in the Antarctica. One day it broke, seemingly for no reason. The instruments the scientists had put on the iceberg recorded a disturbance that they eventually traced back to a storm in Alaska, on the other side of earth. The meaning of all this is that increased storms, a probable result of global warming, increases ice to break and therefore melt, which increases global warming - and that’s another feedback we now have to worry about. Source. Easy read summary.

So I found a way to recycle my organic waste (excluding animal products) through my indoor compost.

Next are those things we can throw into our clear plastic bagged garbage bins in our residencies (here an overview of what we can throw in there), which excludes a huge amount of plastics that are not smaller at the “neck”, like Yoghurt cups, take out food containers, etc. to which I will give some recycle solutions down the page .

If you suspect your building personnel to throw all the recycle-ables in the regular garbage, check for the schedule of pick up and place your own clear bag outside the night before so at least YOU do not recycle in vain.

You can order free recycle posters, flyers, magnets, etc… for your building to remind everyone what goes where.

You can also report (anonymously if you wish in 1 minute online) your building owner/manager/neighbors for failing to adequately recycle and or post signs.

Recycle Electronics

I am finally throwing out my old computer equipment & TV, so I found out where to bring it and if you have any electronic equipment you want to throw out, check the next Lower East Side Ecology Center electronics recycling event, or the next NYC event or for an extensive list of other options go here.

There are good places (Bronx & NY, NJ, CT etc…) where you can drop off your stuff almost any day if you have transportation.

If your computer equipment still works, see if you can donate it to a non-profit.

Not specially recycled electronics, that we usually just put out on the street here in NY, most of the time get shipped to third world countries who then burn those to get to the precious metals while polluting their air and water in the process—of course only where the poorest of the poor actually have to live, breath, drink…

Check out the Computer Take Back Campaign that tries to get computer manufacturers to agree to take back their old machines and take on the responsibility for their products full lifetime.

Take action & tell the EPA to stop shipping the waste to developing Nations.

Dell, HP and Apple have some computer take back programs. Apple’s is fairly new and you have to ask about it when you buy a machine and you will get a voucher to ship your apple product back for free when it died. Contact your computer manufacturer directly and ask.

“Special” Waste

Here some recycling options for the following items:

Household:
fluorescent tubes & bulbs
batteries: household
latex paint (up to 5 gallons per visit)
mercury thermometers and thermostats (up to 2 per visit)

CAR Parts:
batteries: automotive*
motor oil (up to 10 quarts per visit)*
motor oil filters (up to 2 filters per visit)
transmission fluid (up to 5 quarts per visit)
passenger car tires (up to 4 per visit)

You can drop these items off at the Special Waste Drop-off Site, which exist in every borough at the following locations:
• BRONX: Hunts Point at Farragut Street and East River.
• BROOKLYN: Bay 41st Street and Gravesend Bay, south of the Belt Parkway (adjacent to the DSNY Brooklyn 11 garage).
• QUEENS: College Point at 30th Avenue, between 120th and 122nd Streets.
• STATEN ISLAND: Foot of Muldoon Avenue off the West Shore Expressway (440) adjacent to the DSNY Staten Island 3 garage.
• MANHATTAN: DSNY garage at 605 West 30th Street, between 11th & 12th Avenue.

More info about operating hours and locations.

Plastics

You can drop off your PLASTICS #1,2,4 + shopping bags and Plastics #5 from dairy products only (clean and dry, check bottom of your container for numbers), e.g. Yoghurt cups at the Park Slope food coop (I do it once a month when my bag is full) even if you are not a member, since it doesn’t happen in the members only part of the coop. (If you know of a place that takes these plastics beyond Park Slope please inform me!!)

Address:
782 Union Street / Between 6th and 7th avenue / Brooklyn, New York 11215
Recycle Times:
Every 2nd Saturday of a month from noon-2pm;
Every 3rd Thursday a month from 7 – 9pm and
every last Sunday of a month from 10am-noon.

Everything Else

• ANYTHING that’s still good can be donated!
(Bikes, Blood, Clothes, Baby stuff, Books for Prisoners, Building Materials, Cars, Food, sheets, towels and blankets for animal shelters, etc.)

• Eyeglasses – bring them to Lens Crafter stores (or Pearle Vision and BJ Optical at Target), they refurbish them and give them to developing nations

• Batteries: Most can be dropped off at a Radio Shack, from small AAA to laptop and cell batteries…
(or check out Earth911 for more options)

• Cell Phones: drop them off at any Staples or get a tax credit from collective good, or just sell it to Planet green, Inc.
• Apple takes all ipods back (I know why, too)

• printer cartridges: drop them at staples and get your next cartridges for less, OfficeMax, FedEx Kinko’s or sell them to Planet green, Inc

• Furniture:
If still usable:
-Salvation Army offers on line service to schedule pick up or call 1-800-95-TRUCK (1-800-958-7825)
-or Furnish a Future
If not: Curb side / the city will take care of it / more or less

• Clothes:
Depending on the items quality, donate them or bring them to a donation event. Drop them off at Salvation Army, or sell it at a second hand store. If you have clothes, rugs, blankets, other farbic material for recycling check here for vendors.

• Towels, blankets, sheets for Animal shelters.

For everything else and more info in general check:

Free Cycle, a global network for giving and getting stuff for free locally.
NYCWasteLe$$
Earth911
OR: Call the NYC Stuff Exchange toll free at 1-877-NYC-STUFF

Big Time Corporate/National Recycling Information:
The National Recycling Coalition
Resource Recycling Journal

This is my indoor compost that I have been enjoying for a few months. I attended a compost workshop organized by the Lower East Side Ecology Center with the option to buy a full set (box+worms) for 10 dollars (subsidized by the Department of Sanitation).

So far so wonderful – it’s quite exciting so see the worms turn my fine organic food scraps into compost that I can use on my plants or dump it on any nutrient-deprived New York City tree. The worms need very little care, they can feed off the New York Times snippets that are used as “bedding” and to burry the organic waste. No smells come out of the closed box, the worms procreate and you do not need to buy more over time.

Contact the good people at the Lower East Side Ecology Center if you are interested in ANY kind of composting. And for even more resources check out New York City’s Compost Project with many more resources. You can even get a composter certificate and teach others how to compost or get a master composter to come into your class and teach about composting.

If you do not see yourself feeding worms, there are drop off locations for your food scraps (contact first to ensure!), which you could collect in a bag/bin in your freezer until the day of disposal to counter and nasty smells.

The Wyckoff Farm house is one of few wooden farm houses from the 17th century still standing in the U.S. I took a weekend tour with an extraordinary guide, Lucy, who not only described the lives of the family over the centuries but also the changes in the landscape of Brooklyn. This farm is in Flatbush, which is maybe a 45 minute train ride away from central Manhattan for commuters today. The farmers in this area that used to sell their produce to Manhattan would try to avoid a two day trip through Brooklyn and shipped their products on small boats up the creeks into the Bay and down to the tip of Manhattan, which back then was the entire city. The trip was short and convenient but today these creeks don’t exist anymore, since they have been filled in.

Everything that the family produced was made with great care not to waste any materials and any byproducts would be used somewhere else. There was no garbage in the Wyckoff household. For insulation corn combs were squeezed in the cracks of the clay walls. Their front yard was covered with broken oyster shells since they were abundantly available in New York, the capitol of oysters until the early 20th century. The floors in the original part of the house (it went through 3 stages of additions throughout the centuries) were compacted dirt, a well insulating and water resistant flooring people used back in the day. The basement was for storing foods dry and cool all year around. Candles were never used for frivolous things like reading! And so people went to bed at sundown - a live closely adjusted to the seasons and the environment.

My summary is probably a poor account of the wealth of information I received at the tour. I highly recommend if you haven’t had the pleasure of visiting the farm house yet, to do so and you can get the information here.

I went on a green building bus tour on Saturday, organized by an excellent New York non-profit organization called Green Home NYC (they give free lectures, organize tours and the like). We covered the Green Bakeryin the East Village, the Queens Botanical Garden, a Williamsburg Daycare, The Verdesian and The Solaire. The most amazing part of the tour were the excellent sandwiches provided as lunch. None of the green buildings blew me away—no true shifts in the-way-we-live-paradigm. A lot of stuff just makes sense anyway but we simply have been slacking in the past decades with for example, building decently insulated buildings, smart design and choice of material. Most green features weren’t new concepts, except for the green roofs and the solar panels if we consider time to be relative.

Don’t get me wrong. I am happy that the greener (!) building methods are speeding up significantly. I am glad all government buildings starting next year have to be built “green”. The steps we needed to take 20, or at least 10 years ago are finally taking shape.

I want to make some comments about details, accompanied by some pictures from the tour: I am all for decentralizing power (in both senses). Large power plants which sit on the periphery of our city are owned by large corporations who do not care about smart concepts or how much power we actually need. Naturally, they want to expand their profits, not be more efficient or less polluting. “They” don’t even live here.

There is also some loss of power while transporting it from plant to end-user and large amounts of pollution are concentrated in certain areas (pollution always travels though of course). Some smaller plants sit where people haven’t had enough political clout to do something about it including the pollution that seems to be linked to the asthma rates in those neighborhoods.

The Verdesian has its own little power plant (natural gas), just as the Bryant Park#1 building will have. I believe there are great advantages to having the sources of power (including a bit of solar, which never seems to provide more than a few percent of the power required) on site. There is a much bigger incentive to be clean and efficient when catering directly to those who use it.

The bike storage available at the these buildings is something every large apartment building should provide, I mean, we do allow and accept private property (cars) of others to clutter our streets where they are relatively safe but safe space for much smaller more sustainable transportation vehicles (bikes) seems to be a luxury good.

Capturing rainwater for irrigation is good and seems another completely common sense thing to do. My SUV driving, non-green uncle installed a rainwater capture tank underneath his front lawn 10 years ago to feed the toilet flushes - because it made sense to him since where he lives water is expensive.

I also like the decentralized water treatment plant idea but what I saw at The Solaire confused me a bit. When I asked about where the “particles” go after they are separated from the water, the nice (and good looking, as everybody seems to be at The Solaire) guide told me “transported to the cities sewer system”? I wonder how that happens, since without water, “things” won’t flow, so are the materials picked up by trucks and transported with increased costs and presumably some pollution across town? Someone who knows better enlighten me! The remaining water is cleansed and used for the toilets in the building.

If I remember my art class correctly, Klimt, the Austrian artist, thought up a green building over a hundred years ago in Vienna, where the used water was expelled onto a green roof where it flowed through the grass, thereby cleansed and returned into the building for all uses. While I would like to add some extra cleansing features to this process before I drink it, I like the idea that there is no need for much additional water. The same water can be used over and over again: a building self-sufficient with its supply!

I interned at Riverkeeper this summer and saw first hand how hard the intern who was in charge of promoting this screening worked. Now it’s playing at solar one, outdoor movie screen - solar powered - on Monday, October 16, 7pm-9pm - Free!!! (East River between 22nd and 23rd street)

Bring some warm clothes and come join me watch this documentary.

Film synopsis: Chris Swain braved whitewater, sewage, snapping turtles, hydroelectric dams, homeland security patrols, factory outfalls, and PCB contamination to become the first person to swim the entire length of the Hudson River from the Adirondack Mountains to New York City. In the film, Swain’s experience links together stories of the river, which begins in wilderness and ends in one of the nation’s densest population centers. We meet heroes who are fighting to protect the Hudson against a range of threats from industry, inept regulatory agencies and public indifference.

To read more about the film and project, please visit www.swimfortheriver.com.

When I first started to hear about resistence to antibiotics, I felt a tremendous amount of guilt about all the times I pleaded with my doctor to give me a prescription ‘just in case’ when really, the infection may well have been viral. (and even if it hadn’t been, a bit of bed rest & TLC would have done the trick - as the NHS - National Health Service in the UK would prescribe).

The real problem is the misuse of antibiotics in agriculture, specifically in farm animals produced for their meat such as pigs, cows and chickens. The Environmental Defense Organization produced a report back in 2001. These animals are medicated for several reasons including accelerated growth as well as fighting off disease due to the cramped and unsanitary conditions in which they are kept. And it gets worse.

Science News published a short article in its September 9th issue (Vol. 170, No. 11) on the appearance of drug-resistant DNA in the environment. In short, the misuse of antibiotics has led to these resistant genes which are now showing up not only in our rivers but also in treated drinking water. A group of environmental engineers at Colorado State University in Fort Collins have tracked the spread of these genes and found that the highest concentrations were in waste collection lagoons on dairy farms near the river. They then made their way thourgh the irrigation ditches to the rivers.

These days, we are faced with more than just one inconvenient truth. The sentience of the animals we consume for food and clothing should definitely hold the same title, but as the Abrahamic view of man’s inherent right to dominate the land and everything both on and in it holds strong in even the most adament atheist, I ask you to embrace this alternative reason and think twice before opting for the cheaper pack of chicken cutlets: consume less meat and when you do buy it, spend a little more and go for the organically produced, free range option.

Dr. Helen Caldicott, a physician and anti-nuclear activist for decades, published a new book titled: “Nuclear Power is Not the Answer”. She gave a lot of radio interviews to promote the book and I wanted to post the link to the best interview here. Listen to it beginning to end. It’s fantastic! It also goes specifically into New York’s nuclear plants.

Eco-logic, wbai, September 19th, 2006. Download here.

Another fantastic speech By Caldicott in White Plains along with Indian Point Safe Energy Coalition on September 17th, 2006, aired by Eco-logic, wbai, October 31st, 2006. Download here.

This is a short summary of the global warming news I have been hearing on various radio programs that I listen to on my ipod (I will soon put up an extensive podcast list for those interested). Most of the info though is from Michio Kaku’s Explorations radio program on 9/13/06. You can get it here.

Florida State University did some testing and determined that warmer ocean water, which strengthens hurricanes is heated by the atmosphere (not the other way around or any other way - sounds logical but guess what - there was controversy).

The reason we had a relatively calm hurricane season this year and maybe milder weather? The melting ice sheets are cooling our oceans temporarily.

But not only the ice sheets are melting at a faster rate each year, the tundra is also thawing at a faster and faster rate. This releases CO2 and Methane (CH4). Methane, a gas produced “naturally” (and by for example the huge amount of cows we need to fill fast food hamburgers) is being released 5 times as much as usual from the frozen tundra around the world because of global warming. The methane had been stored there since the last ice age 40,000 years ago says Michio Kaku on wbai’s Explorations (9/13/06). Methane traps heat in its molecules 23 times more effectively than CO2, though it’s half life is “only” a decade versus a century for CO2, so it is a very powerful global warming agent. All these facts mean that rapid heating could happen pretty soon - causing - more heating (positive feedback), and more heating and so on… This might lead to a lot more CO2 being released than previously estimated, since the tundra holds about the amount of CO2 we would produce in a hundred years. Imagine the tundra thawing out releasing this huge amount of CO2. Some now say our worst case scenarios of 4 to 10 F degree warming in our century was rather conservative because the feedbacks causing more and more warming were underestimated. Perhaps 8 to 20F degrees should be considered a fair worst case scenario.

One study proclaims CO2 levels 27% higher than in the last 650,000 years and Methane 130% higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years.

I am now not laughing anymore at the suggestion of some scientist to eject lots of particles in the stratosphere to reflect some of the sunlight back into space and artificially cool the planet while we clean up our act and curb emissions. This idea used to be discussed at the bar after scientific conferences now it’s the subject of scientific conferences, paraphrasing the radio host of the NPR environment radio show (9/14/06).

The Republican Governor of California may have stood by W’s side during election campaigns, but when it comes to greenhouse gases, Arnie & Georgie are not on the same page. An article in the NY Times today discusses Bill AB32 that Arnold helped put together, which was passed by California’s Senate yesterday.