It's not easy being green- but it could be easier

Environmentalists tell everyone to “Go Green” and “Buy Green,” but I myself, as someone with slightly more than passing knowledge about these issues, am finding it nearly impossible.

We bought our first home about four years ago, and that was the first of many experiences with the problems that stem from bad or incomplete advice from professionals. The air quality around the house is about 50 times worse than the national average. This was largely due to the proximity of a manufacturing plant (which we knew about) and the dirtiest coal-fired power plant in the state (which we didn’t). In fact, it was just a few months later that I was driving down the street on a clear day, and saw the plume from the smokestacks of the coal plant ahead in the distance. I drove past it but could see no sign telling what it was. We also learned never to work with a realtor who is just about to retire and wants the process to go quickly; and never to hire a home inspector recommended by your realtor (because they are in cahoots with the realtor to help make the sale, and are careful to gloss over the drawbacks). But all that is another story.

The house was a fixer-upper, so we’ve had to make many purchasing decisions in the past four years, both major and minor. The first was a furnace. I was misled by the installer to not get the highest-efficiency furnace because he trivialized the savings, saying it would take 15 years before the savings added up significantly. Turns out that installing the higher efficiency furnaces requires a lot more work, which cut into his profits. In actuality, the energy savings would have been much more significant.

Then, I needed a roof. I did pretty good with getting the solar-powered vent, but I was not even given the option of a metal roof. I later found out that I could have prevented a dumpster full of tar shingles from going into a landfill, plus increased the reflectivity of the roof and decreased my cooling costs, if I had chosen a metal roof. But it was not even presented as an option. One contractor told me they just don’t offer it because they figure no one would want it. But if you drive out west a few miles from me, there’s an area where many of the houses have metal roofs. Someone out there must have known the advantages of having a metal roof and how to install one.

Eventually, I began doing a little more research before buying stuff. If I had to go spending the rather small amount of money I had at my disposal, I wanted to get the best (greenest, most efficient) product I possibly could as long as the prices were fairly comparable. Generally though, this means that I have to have things shipped from green building supply places, of which there are none around here. I got my non-VOC (volatile organic compound) paint shipped from a supply store in NYC. I have had to pay for all the paint sample cards (cost + shipping), whereas you can just hop on over and pick up as many as you want for free at Home Depot. And let me tell you how much fun it was trying to determine the VOC content of various paints. At Home Depot, the paint company’s representative had no idea how to answer, so the employee handed me a phone to talk with someone at the company directly. Turns out the manufacturer sells two different versions of their paint (with two different levels of VOCs), and only people who live in California can get the low VOC paint. I’ve had the same experience trying to get non-toxic sealers and caulks: playing phone tag with manufacturers out in California, only to be told that they can’t sell their product in New York State for regulatory reasons.

Then there was the showerhead. You can’t just look at the packages at the store to compare how many gallons per minute the showerhead lets out. The information simply isn’t on the package. Some claim to be “Low Flow,” but that can mean anywhere from 0.5 to 2 gpm. It was also a lot harder to find a low flow handheld shower than a shower head that just stays on the wall. So I got the Eco Flow model from WaterPik (this item is only sold at Wal Mart so I ordered it directly from the company) because it claimed that the “Water Pause” setting was 0.8 gpm. Well, the instructions did not tell you which one of eight settings was the “Water Pause” setting, and you could tell no difference while in the shower. I called the company, and the person who answered the phone did not have the information and basically suggested I figure it out. I then took a funnel and an empty gallon container and tried all eight settings. Guess what? No difference. So I called the company back again. The person I spoke to that time said you need to take out this little flow regulator piece within the unit. But she still could not tell me exactly which setting it was, and it all depends on the local water pressure. There is absolutely no mention of needing to do this in the instructions, although the package’s back cover is filled with a large bar graph telling you how much money you save using the Water Pause setting that is nearly impossible to find out how to use. I think about how much time I have put into this shower head thing and I know that a less-obsessed person would have given up long ago. I know none of us are new to the concept of green-washing, but it seems like either people are making false claims or no claims whatsoever about environmental impact.

Then there’s my brand new dehumidifier. Like a good little greenie I went to the Energy Star website, and found a unit I could order that was leaps and bounds more efficient than the ones labeled “Energy Star” that you can buy at Home Depot. This neat thing has the extra added bonus of being an air purifier at the same time. In my damp moldy basement I have had a dehumidifier (a Home Depot purchase that never worked right- had it in for service 2 times before the one-year warranty ran out, and it had lately lost the ability to shut itself off) and 2 Home Depot- purchased air cleaners running (these were an emergency purchase last year while I was in the middle of my umpteenth exacerbation of chronic bronchitis and I could not even go down into the basement to do the laundry without my chest getting tight, and I had to get two because each one was rated for a square-footage smaller than the basement). So when I heard that I could have one highly efficient unit do the job of those three, you better believe I made the financial sacrifice. I figured the drop in my energy bill alone would justify it. Guess what? The thing only works at temperatures above 65 degrees F (and is inefficient at temperatures lower than 80 degrees). My basement is 58 degrees right now in February, and will probably stay near that temperature for 9 months out of the year. Was this information available to me before I purchased this thing and had it shipped to me? What do you think? The guy on the phone from the company suggested I increase the heat in the basement. Me, who causes my family to freeze (according to them) and can endlessly be heard saying, “Put on a sweater.” Me, who had the house we just got done painting literally torn apart to insulate the walls. This guy tells me to start heating my basement to a higher temperature than I heat the rest of the house.

And then there’s the toilets. Oh, the toilets. I did try the putting a gallon jug in the back of the tank thing. The old 1960’s era toilets didn’t like that so much. So I tried half-gallon containers. Still no good. So when the upstairs toilet gave up completely, I thought this was a great opportunity to get a water saving toilet. I checked out the local home stores. Lowes actually had a very nice comparison brochure. The toilets were all about 1.6 gallons per flush, which was better than my old dinosaurs. But I wanted to see if I could do better. An Australian company called Caroma makes toilets that can deliver a “half-flush” (0.8 gallon) or a “full-flush” (1.6 gallons). This made a lot of sense to me because you only need the full flush every now and then- you can read between the lines. These toilets were comparable in price to ones available at Lowes or Home Depot, so I thought, let’s try it. If we can’t do it, we’ll hire a plumber. Well, I won’t bore you with the problems we had because they’re made for 4” outlet pipes, and only the downstairs bathroom had a 4” pipe (the upstairs bathroom had a 3” outlet pipe, which I have now learned is a fairly common occurrence because the joints of 4" pipes are too big to fit into standard width walls) or how frantic we were, because in order to determine this, both toilets were unavailable. I called a few local plumbers and essentially their advice was to get a regular toilet. I cringed at the thought of how much it would cost me to ship them back. They were delivered in a semi: four big cardboard boxes on a skid, and the delivery guy used a forklift to get it all into my garage. Eventually, we got the toilets installed BUT (of course) they don‘t work as well as I had hoped. The guy from the company surmises that there’s a problem with the flow in the lateral sewer pipe going from the house to the street. With this type of “down flush” toilet, that causes a bigger problem than with the pressure- or vacuum-assisted toilets you can get at Home Depot. The point is, if there was someone locally who had the expertise to get and install them, it would have been a lot easier, and much less risky. So you wouldn’t have to be as insane as me to get these toilets, and if the professional determined that the plumbing in the house was inadequate for the Caroma toilets, the next best model could be chosen.

My family wanted to look into getting a flat-panel LCD TV with the tax return. (Plasma screens are power sucking monsters.) I considered it because I figure since flat panel computer monitors use much less energy than the standard bulky monitor, maybe a flat-panel TV would too. So there I go again to energystar.gov. Only this time, there’s no nice little spreadsheet comparing actual electricity usage side-by-side like the one I looked at for dehumidifiers. The only information given is which models qualify for the Energy Star label. So I do a little Google-ing, and find an Australian website that has a nice apples-to-apples comparison. I find out that the problem with the Energy Star rating of flat panel televisions is that models are qualified based on how much power they draw while turned “off,” not how much power they use when on. The Australian website used a five-star type rating system, but it was all relative based on the size (a 20-inch drawing 60 watts and a 55-inch drawing over 200 watts both got 5 stars for efficiency). If I was a really good greenie, I’d have NO television, but the family is already close enough to mutiny over the thermostat. So the model we like best draws 138 watts. The point of this story is that you can’t simply go by the Energy Star label.

I also wanted to get these Handy Switches- “As seen on TV!” It’s a little gizmo you plug into the outlet, then plug your electronic thing (light, etc) into it. Basically, it’s a remote-controlled, wireless version of a wall on/off switch. Since I have tried to address standby power usage in our home by getting about five thousand power strips, and no one in the house remembers to turn them all off before going to bed anyway, I thought this might be a lot more user-friendly (and cheaper than hiring an electrician to install more wall-mounted on/off switches). But of course I want to know how much power (if any) they draw while “off” (since all remote-controlled devices draw power while off- thus the standby power problem), and other sorts of questions like that. I called the company. No one could answer my question, but they took my name and number and someone would get back to me. No one did, so I ordered them and was pleasantly surprised when my Kill-A-Watt registered zero. However, one night I smelled something burning upstairs, and after much searching eventually discovered that the Handy Switch within a foot of my son's bed had started to melt. Fortunately, the fire department determined that there was no fire in the wall. But you better believe that was the end of the Handy Switches. Off to the Consumer Products Safety Commission they went. (Update: these have since been recalled because 9 people had actual fires as a result of the devices.)

You have to know what questions to ask. And sometimes people simply don‘t know the answers to questions. I once had to tell the woman who answered the phone for the county’s Household Hazardous waste program, “Yes, you do take compact fluorescent bulbs.” These questions are often so out of the ordinary that asking them makes you feel like an idiot. For any one who is shy, or you guys out there who are just morally opposed to asking questions (you know who you are) this can be a major roadblock to buying green. If a zealot like me is having trouble, how can we expect the average person to spend the time on this or navigate through the incomplete and conflicting information?

The best thing we could do to help people make smarter purchasing decisions is to have somewhere to go where one can physically see the products and take them home at that moment, the ecological impact is listed very clearly (energy use, water use, toxin content, etc.), and someone knowledgeable is on hand to offer guidance. An impartial source should test the companies’ claims, and the consumer can be told in advance about any special requirements (such as a certain diameter pipe or a very well functioning sewer lateral) or little quirks like having to modify the way something is originally put together to make it work right (like my shower head). The internet is not good enough because not everyone is computer-savvy, and many are rightfully hesitant to buy things online. Can you trust the merchant? And not many people make major purchases without being able to go an physically see something. Then there’s shipping charges, it’s a pain to return things…. In other words, we need a green building supply store. We also need a listing of reputable green contractors who know about the latest materials. This listing could be kept on hand at the green building supply store so people can have their new purchase installed properly. The people who run the store will be able to find many little-known products because that is their specialty area. And it would be a wonderful education opportunity. As someone is strolling the aisles of the Green Building Supply store, they could see and endcap display with power strips, be educated on standby power AND be able to purchase the solution at that very moment! So who wants to get it started?

"Experienced Politicians"

I don’t understand the charge that we can’t have a president who’s an “inexperienced” politician. Why do we want “experienced” politicians anyway? What are they experienced in? Navigating a system to make a fat living off the biggest kickbacks possible while not getting caught and still managing to convince their constituents, "Hey, I'm on your side." These are people who have developed the cynicism and thick skin that allows them to play games with peoples’ lives. Take for example the decision to go to war, or to deny funding for healthcare or schools. This is not something that affects them personally if they’re experienced politicians, because their own healthcare is unaffected, their kids are well out of elementary school and are not members of the class that makes up the majority of the military: lower class kids with no other choice or way for advancement. So why would we want these people making the decisions? Politicians have too many layers separating them from the reality of the lives their decisions affect, and this allows them to play games. Legislation is passed based on who has enough favors to call in or whether it’s part of the party agenda, not on its merits. Money is allocated to the groups who have enough money to lobby for it in the first place. The politicians are the winners in this system, and the average middle to lower class person is the loser.

What would happen if we booted out all these "experienced politicians” and put average people in these positions instead? (The only way to make that happen, incidentally, is publicly funded elections.) I’m sure your average citizen would be appalled at the depth of corruption and indifference. The average citizen would either be or know personally someone affected by bad foreign policy (i.e.- trade policies and war), and the broken healthcare, economic and educational systems. The average citizen would make real efforts to fix these problems, and would not accept that the way business is conducted in Washington cannot be changed.

So Obama is an experienced community leader but an inexperienced politician. How on earth can anyone believe that is a bad thing?