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Story Archives of 'Conservation'
Ninety Days of Trash
By Virginia Prescott on Wednesday, October 21, 2009.Yesterday was garbage day in Concord, New Hampshire. People gathered their purple pay-as-you-throw bags filled with food wrappers, kitty litter, and paper towels and set them on the curb. By the time they got home from work, a garbage truck had whisked those bags away and trucked them to one of the nearly three thousand landfills in North America.
I recycle, I have a compost pile, and I’m admittedly a little neurotic about minimizing trash, so most weeks i don’t give my garbage a second thought. But if Canadian filmmaker Andrew Nisker saw my weekly output, he might put me up to a challenge: to collect and store all of my garbage for three months.
Nisker found a family who was willing to pile up ninety days worth of waste in their garage. He filmed the entire pungent ordeal in order to illustrate just how much trash one family can produce. Then he connected the dots between that mound of garbage and the pollution that clogs landfills and waterways around the world.
Andrew Nisker joins us for our Garbage! The Revolution Starts at Home at the Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro, Vermont.
(Photo by Charley Lhasa via Flickr/Creative Commons)
Paying Farmers Not to Clear the Rainforest
By Virginia Prescott on Wednesday, September 2, 2009.
In Brazil, the lure of quick money in exchange for an acre of land proves tempting for many landowners. Cleared land, which can be used to farm soybeans or raise cattle, fetches as much as $1,300 an acre. The environmental impact is striking: 70 percent of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions can be traced back to deforestation.
The Brazilian government is hoping to change that by offering cash hand-outs to landowners who agree not to raze their land. Here to tell us more is Jeff Tollefson. He’s an energy and environment correspondent for Nature who recently returned from the Peruvian Amazon. He joins us on the line from Washington, DC as part of our “next green thing” series.
Nature: Paying To Save The Rainforests (subscription required)
New York Times: In Brazil, Paying Farmers to Let the Trees Stand
(Photo by LeRoc via Flickr/Creative Commons)
Calculating Your Water Footprint
By Virginia Prescott on Thursday, August 27, 2009.
Here’s an eye-opening statistic: that mid-day cup of coffee you were about to grab took 37 gallons of water to produce. If your lunch today is a hamburger, that’s another 634 six gallons. Many of the foods we eat and the products we use are much more water intensive than we might realize. From irrigation to assembly to transportation, nearly every step of a supply chain uses water.
In fact, only 6 percent of the water Americans consume actually comes from household use like dishwashers and laundry. So how do we use the other 94 percent? Arjen Hoekstra wants both consumers and corporations to know where the rest of that water goes. He’s the scientific director at the Water Footprint Network and Professor of Water Management at the University of Twente the Netherlands. He joins us from his home in the Netherlands as part of our “next green thing” series.
Calculate Your Water Footprint
Mother Jones: What's Your Water Footprint?
(Photo by Keith Barlow via Flickr/Creative Commons)
What are the new energy efficiency incentives for homeowners?
By EarthTalk on Sunday, August 23, 2009.
EarthTalk®
From the Editors of E/The Environmental Magazine
Lakes Region Conservation Trust
By Deborah Schachter on Saturday, July 11, 2009.John Oliver grew up with a sense of awe and respect for the land outside his farmhouse window. Now, he helps the Lakes Region Conservation Trust care for and protect that land – nearly 2600 acres on Red Hill in Moultonborough.
Energy Alternatives? Think Conservation First
By Rick Ganley on Friday, May 22, 2009.To save energy- and money- start with the basics.
Conservation Gadgets
By Virginia Prescott on Wednesday, May 20, 2009.Going green sometimes requires a helping hand. As part of our week-long series on our renewable energy future, NHPR’s Internet sherpa and new media coordinator Brady Carlson is with us to review some of the latest gadgets to help us conserve energy.
Something that Brady learned through managing NHPR’s Public Insight Network (a group of listeners who share their observations and personal experiences) was that a lot of people feel like there are serious obstacles to some of the green changes they'd like to make in their lives. A lot of people said they'd really like to have their own solar panel, generate their own clean energy instead of using fossil fuels, but the up-front costs are just too high and the tax credits aren't enough to make it feasible. Or they want to buy a hybrid, but don't think the time is right to get a new car. And there were people who said they'd already made a lot of green changes – they recycle, they compost, they switched to CFLs, etc.
Brady's goal was to find conservation-friendly gadgets and resources that people could use right now without a major investment of time and money, or any major lifestyle changes. (which is what we all really want anyway, right?)
Brady's suggested conservation gadgets:
Maybe you're not at a point you can power your house on solar, but maybe you can power your tech gadgets. Portable solar chargers are becoming pretty useful – they're compact and, of course, portable, and for 30 to 50 bucks you have a solar charger for your cell phones, BlackBerries, MP3 players, even laptops. Is this alone going to solve the energy issue? No, but for Internet sherpas, or even just tech-savvy people, turning your tech energy over to solar is a good step in the right direction.
Laundry is one of the most energy-intensive chores we do. The Veos is a design for a fabric softener dispenser, so it goes into the machine with your clothes. It harvests the kinetic energy from the clothes being spun and tossed around. When the wash is done, you pull the Veos out and hook it into your grid and use the energy. This isn't going to reclaim all the energy you use in the laundry - so clothesline advocates may not be Veos users – but if you use a machine and want to do so, this may be for you.
New England has a lot of old, drafty houses, so conserving energy for us starts with being efficient with the energy we're already generating. Thermal leak detectors help you figure out where you're losing energy by comparing temperatures at different places on your wall. They're like stud finders – you point them at the wall, and they let you know where the temperature change is significant. If you find a big difference, there's a good chance it's a spot where you might need more insulation. I've read that the detectors aren't as simple as point-and-shoot and that you do have to spend more than a little time to really get a handle on your energy, but these cost around forty bucks, so the price is right and with a little learning you can start to see where you can make weatherization really count in your house.
Many of us who garden often have more than we can use. In this case, we either can it, which is time consuming, or we let it rot, which is wasteful, or we find someone to share it with. Veggie Trader lets you interact with other gardeners in your area who have extra veggies so that you can make the most of your garden. How is this conservation? Because eating local food means you're not buying food shipped in from somewhere else, so that saves energy. And it's community-building at the same time! Great quote from one of the operators, who said someone told them: “I wish I had this last year so I didn’t have a yard full of raccoons getting drunk off my fermenting plums.”
(Photo by solar charger Shawn Brandow via Flickr/Creative Commons)
Energy Conservation and Building Efficiency
By Laura Knoy on Wednesday, April 22, 2009.New science suggests inefficient homes, businesses and other buildings contribute more to climate change than transportation or industrial production. We'll look at where New Hampshire's at when it comes to conserving energy in our buildings.
Guests
- Mary Downes, energy efficiency specialist at the New Hampshire Office of Energy and Planning
- Gil Gelano, manager of marketing support at PSNH; he helps coordinate programs among New Hampshire utilities aimed at improving customers' energy efficiency
- Dick Henry, executive director at the Jordan Institute, an environmental organization focused on green building
We'll also hear from
- Don LaTourette, co-owner of Building Energy Technologies, LLC, working on weatherization and making buildings energy-efficient
Lakes Region Conservation Trust
By Deborah Schachter on Saturday, April 18, 2009.John Oliver grew up with a sense of awe and respect for the land outside his farmhouse window. Now, he helps the Lakes Region Conservation Trust care for and protect that land – nearly 2600 acres on Red Hill in Moultonborough.
Layoffs and Cutbacks Affect Environmental Organizations
By Amy Quinton on Tuesday, February 24, 2009.Layoffs and cutbacks are affecting environmental organizations across the state.
Donations to many of the groups are down.
Some towns have even considered using money designated for conservation to fill local budget gaps.
But as New Hampshire Public Radio’s Amy Quinton reports a poor economy may not be all bad news for the environment.
