To shut down, or not to shut down

To shut down the computer at night, or not to shut down at night, that is the question for today!

A few folks have been challenging me on the April 28th action item, "Shut down your computer tonight before you go to bed." Isn't it true, they said, that it uses up more energy to boot up a computer than to leave it running in "sleep" mode?

That got me thinking...maybe it is better to leave the computer humming all night than to give it that big jolt of a wake-up call in the morning. I'm pretty sure the monitor should be shut off, or at least put in sleep mode. And what about those plugged-in cell phone chargers when the cell phone is in your pocket? Do I really have to unplug the charger from the wall?

To answer these burning questions, I turned to the tech guy at my office, Jake, who truly knows everything there is to know about all things technology. Here was his response, boiled down to a set of simple rules that I will try to live by:

1) Desktops are better left ON at night to save energy
2) Monitors should be turned OFF at night
3) Printers at home should be turned OFF at night
4) Laptops should be turned OFF at night
5) When turning a laptop ON, power up with the BATTERY, then plug it in.
6) Turn OFF external speakers when you are not using them
7) UNPLUG your cellphone chargers when you are not using them
8) Don't print unless you NEED to, and then use RECYCLED paper!

Wow, what a list. It really makes things pretty simple. I'd love to know if any of you out there disagree with any of his recommendations, but they all seem pretty reasonable to me.

On the printing front, we've been doing a neat thing at home for several years. You know how some printers at the office will print out a cover page with each document that shows who the owner of the document is? And you know how that is a huge waste of paper? Well, both Jon and I (and our co-workers) create separate piles of those cover sheets, and then folks take them home to re-use as printer paper. We save lots of money and trees by re-using this paper for our personal printing at home. You could also use that paper for scratch pads, if you cut it into 1/2 or 1/4 size sheets.

Just a friendly little tip to save a few trees!

OK, enough preaching for today. Tomorrow should be an easy one for me -- turning off the faucet while brushing my teeth. I wonder how much water we all waste without even realizing it...

Heaters and Showers and Pesticides, Oh My!

(Darby) OK, so we haven't been blogging every day, but we have been following the list every day!

I'm finding some of the items on our list are hard to do with children. For example, now that the weather has turned chilly again for a few days, the action of turning down our thermostat two degrees is a tough one to follow. I totally appreciate how it saves energy (and money) and helps the environment to turn the heater down, but it's hard to see my kids freezing when they get out of bed in the morning. We did buy each of them a down comforter this year to keep them warmer during winter nights, and we also had their bedroom windows fixed last year, because we had some seals that were broken. But, still, that change from 68 to 66 degrees is quite a leap for us. I'm guessing I'll feel the same way about it in the summer months when the kids come home from camp sweaty and broiling and we've turned the A/C down...(I can just hear the whining now...)

Another tough one was on Sunday, taking a shorter shower with less hot water. I love hot showers. And, to put things honestly, my daughter is a big slowpoke in the shower. OK, so maybe if I take hot but fast showers, and she takes cool but long showers, we can balance each other out!?!

Friday's entry was to buy organic fruits and veggies for Shabbat dinner. Some friends have been challenging me on that one. They understand the environmental benefits of buying locally-grown produce, but why does buying organic help the environment? I did a little googling, and the answer was not that straightforward. But, from what I've learned, it's all about avoiding pesticides. Think about it. Farmers use up a lot more energy spraying pesticides, especially when they are petroleum-based. I also learned that over 98% of pesticides reach a destination other than their target species, polluting other species, the air, our water, and our food. (Ever seen one of those airplanes spraying pesticides? It's easy to see how this happens!) And some pesticides also actually known to contribute to global warming and depletion of the ozone layer.

Organic farming, on the other hand, relies on crop rotation, manure, compost, and biological pest control to maintain soil productivity and control pests and thus has a much lower impact on the environment. (Thanks wikipedia!! You were a big help!)

I hope that explains things a little better. This is one item I'm going to try to keep up with at the grocery store.

One final thought I wanted to end with. We went to shul on Saturday and there was a wonderful guest speaker. It was Nihli Simhai from the Teva Learning Center. Teva is a Jewish environmental educational institute that works with day schools, religious schools, synagogues, camps and youth groups to "ecologically inspire" kids and adults in a Jewish way. Ms. Simhai, who grew up at B'nai Jeshurun, did a great job of ecologically inspiring all of us to do simple acts, like to say our prayers outside in nature every now and then, in order to better feel G-d's presence. They have a wonderful website and offer a bi-weekly email called "Tikkun Tips" that features one simple change or action that you can take, every other week, to reduce your impact on the environment. I think it's a great resource, and encourage you to visit the page and sign up for the emails. www.tevacenter.org.

That's it for now. The next few actions on our list are starting to focus more on reducing energy usage. Uh oh, I'm bad with that...this is going to be a challenge, for sure!!

Passover Day 4

(Darby) OK, now that the seders are over, my pace of cooking and cleaning has slowed down considerably and it gives me a little time to blog!! Phew, much easier!

The first few days of actions on the carbon footprint list were thankfully easy, because I was pretty wiped out after the seders and going back to work. So it was easy enough to store my leftover food in reusable containers, and to use real plates as much as possible.

Unfortunately we don't actually have that many place settings of dishes for Passover, so it means we're either doing a lot of washing at the sink, or running the dishwasher every night (which we don't normally do). I guess it makes me wonder whether it's relatively better for the environment to use paper plates and recycle them, than to keep running my dishwasher!

OK, I think the best solution of all is to hoof it on over to Target and buy myself some more glass plates. I'll have to add that to my list for next year.

I did get smart (well, sort of) last year, and I bought a bunch of those Gladware containers specifically for Passover, so that from year to year, I don't need to worry about having the right size containers for the leftovers. Now, if I could just find a matching lid!

Anyhow, what I really wanted to write about today was recycling. Here's a little quiz for our readers to see how much you know about recycling in your community. Do you think each of the following is, or is not recyclable in your community?

Junk mail
Magazines
Cardboard boxes
Books (hard and soft cover)
Catalogs
Computer paper
Gift boxes
Cereal boxes
Greeting cards
Aluminum/tin foil
Pizza boxes
Paint
Hangers
Lightbulbs
Styrofoam
Milk cartons
Aerosol cans

Now, each community is different, but if you were to take a big red pen and draw a line below tin foil (above pizza boxes), most of the stuff above the line would be recyclable, and most of the stuff below the line is not. Here are some links to some of our community's rules on recycling.

http://www.solonohio.org/PublicWorks/serviceInfo.html
http://www.pepperpike.org/service_rubbish.asp
http://www.beachwoodohio.com/rubbish.html#recycling
http://www.shakeronline.com/services/collection/Recycling.asp

We just learned a few weeks ago that Beachwood changed its rules and now accepts a lot more items for recycling. So, now we have put our recycling bin right next to our garbage can in the kitchen, and are filling up the big blue bag about twice a week, rather than once a week. I just love that we can recycle junk mail!!

OK, enough blogging for tonight. The next couple of days should be pretty easy too -- the weather has been gorgeous so we haven't had our thermostat on at all, and have been opening windows and curtains to let the sunshine and warm breezes fill the house. How's that for saving energy?

Our next big challenge -- buying organic fruts and veggies for Shabbat dinner. What, it isn't enough to be buying Kosher for Passover foods, now I have to buy organic too? Who came up with this list?

Just kidding. More later!

The Seders

(Jon) With Shabbat and the Seders, we're now catching back up with the blogging. (here's a little secret: we're writing this on April 23, not April 20!)

First thing, we forgot to give a link to the list of daily actions. So . . . here 'tis: http://bnaijeshurun.org/documents/carbon-footprint-handout.pdf

You can find an action to reduce your carbon footprint for each day until Shavuot at that link.

Now, back to our heroes' attempt to do something green each day.

On April 20, the 2d Seder, this list suggests we recite the 10 Plagues of Global Warming. Admittedly, Darby and I cobbled these plagues together from a number of sources. But we were able to work them into our Haggadah pretty easily. Darby said that when we read "drought," "food shortages," and "war," it made her think about how climate change isn't just about changes to the Earth, but that people are already being affected directly. Last June, for example, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon blamed the violence in Darfur on climate change. UN statistics showed that rainfall declined 40% over the past 20 years in sub-Saharan Africa. With this drought, there wasn't enough food or water, which led to fighting among the people trying to make do with fewer resources.

(brief commercial for Rabbi Weiss: he is one of Cleveland's key leaders on both climate change and the effort to help the Darfur region. Thank you, Rabbi!)


That's it for "today." See you "tomorrow."

Day 1: The Feather

(Jon) I wasn’t sure how I would feel about combining the religious practice of searching for chametz with something so mundane as searching for window drafts. Ever since the kids were old enough to search, I had enjoyed going around the house with them, carrying flashlights and feathers. But the idea this year was to use the feather to “look” for window drafts. Seemed kind of weird, but then again, it was on the list!

Max helped me hide the ten pieces of bread, wrapped in tin foil in various places around the house. We hid the pieces near windows to make it easier to use our feather to check for drafts.

It didn’t take long for Lily and Max to find each piece, with Max using his flashlight to guide Lily. When they found a piece, they would hold the feather near the window and look to see if there was any air coming in. Luckily, we didn’t find any drafts, but then again, it wasn’t a real windy day, and the kids kept running off with the feather to find the next bit of chametz.

After around the 7th piece, Max got bored and started drawing a picture in his room. But Lily said, “I was happy there weren’t any drafts, and I liked searching for the chametz.”

When we were all done, I actually felt good that I had given new meaning to the act of searching. Looking for drafts didn’t end up just being a mundane home improvement exercise like I had feared…If I had found a draft and fixed it, it would have meant a big energy savings. And that’s something we’re all searching for.

On to the next steps…Happy Pesach everyone!

PS. I almost forgot to take the chametz out of the foil so that I could recycle the foil!

Welcome to our Blog!

(Darby) This is a real first for us – not to be getting involved in an issue we care about, but to have been motivated by the Anglican Church!

We heard a few months ago that the Anglican Church was encouraging its membership to go on a “Carbon Fast” for Lent. They were asking their congregants to change some aspect of their lives that left a carbon footprint, like taking public transportation instead of driving, shutting down their computers at night, etc.

We thought to ourselves, why not put a Jewish twist on this? Since Passover was right around the corner, and we were making our plans to clean all the chametz out of our house, why not think about cleaning out extra energy usage too?

OK, so then we thought, if we can do it, why not see if others at B’nai Jeshurun might do it too?

So we decided to come up with a list of things that would be relatively easy for people to do to help the environment. At first we thought about just coming up with actions during the week of Passover. But then Rabbi Weiss challenged us to think beyond Passover, all the way through the Counting of the Omer to Shavuos. Wow, that would mean coming up with more than 50 actions! We were a little overwhelmed, but decided to give it a shot.

We sat down at our computers late one night, Jon on the desktop, me on the laptop. It was like dueling banjos. He’d come up with a few ideas, then me a few. And before we knew it, we had not only come up with more than 50 actions, but had also created a list of the Ten Plagues of Global Warming.

We did quite a bit of googling that night to get our ideas and inspiration. The items on the list are not original thoughts, but we tried to put a Jewish spin onto many of the recommended actions that are out there on the web. The list is tied to the calendar, and takes into account Shabbat and holidays with special prayers and ways to celebrate the holidays in a green way. We were inspired by a few great websites out there, including http://www.coejl.org/ (the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life).

We hope you will read the list, and even if you don’t do all of the steps, perhaps you’ll find a few that will inspire you to make a change here or there to help protect the environment.

We, on the other hand, are going to follow all of our own advice (imagine that!). For the next 50-some days, we are going to be keeping a blog of what it’s like to make these simple changes in our life.

We hope you’ll check in with us every now and then to see how it’s going. But make sure you turn your computer off when you’re done!

Chag Sameach,

Darby and Jon