GREENer HOUSE

I just received a comment to a year-old post about compact fluorescent lamps. The reader raises concerns about mercury in CFLs. I replied to him at length with my own comment, but the information is too important to leave it buried there.

The issue of mercury in CFLs keeps rearing its head. I once read a long article in the Star that left the reader with the impression that CFLs’ negatives may outweigh their positives.

This is simply not true. If you read what the independent experts have to say, it is clear that compact fluorescents reduce the amount of mercury in the environment in the long run. One thorough article on the subject notes that:

CFLs represent between 0.006 and 0.04 percent of U.S. anthropogenic [mercury] emissions

It concludes:

CFLs prevent the emissions of substantial quantities of mercury, greenhouse gases and other pollutants; they reduce consumer energy bills; and they last far longer than incandescent alternatives. They are currently the environmentally preferable product despite their mercury content – whether they are recycled or not.

Two other web pages worth reading on the subject can be found at the Natural Resources Defense Council and Popular Mechanics.

The reason CFLs can contribute to mercury emission reductions despite containing mercury is that coal-burning power plants are the world’s largest contributor to mercury emissions. In the U.S., they are responsible for about a third of the mercury released. Since coal accounts for less than half of U.S. electricity generation and about 90 percent of South Africa’s electricity generation, it’s safe to say that more than half of all mercury released in South Africa comes from Eskom. Cut your electricity consumption and you reduce mercury pollution.

Aside from the broader environmental issue, some people are concerned about exposing their families to a source of dangerous mercury in their homes. John Balbus, M.D., the Chief Health Officer at Environmental Defense, writes

The exposure from breaking a compact fluorescent bulb is in about the same range as the exposure from eating a can or two of tuna fish.

Still, if a bulb breaks in your home, it’s worth following a few precautions such as using disposable paper towels to wipe up—not a vacuum cleaner—and washing your hands when you are finished. For more details, you can read the instructions suggested by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

I don’t want to go too far in minimizing the dangers of mercury. It is a serious poison, and we should all try to reduce our contribution to mercury pollution in any way we can. Batteries are a very large source of mercury, so you should only buy watch batteries and alkaline batteries that are mercury free. (Recyclable batteries are even better, of course.)

In buying CFLs, the best recommendation is to stick with major international brands such as Osram, GE and Philips. They have to comply with EU standards that allow no more than 5 mg of mercury in a globe. Osram CFLs have 3.5 mg according to their technical marketing manager in South Africa, Wally Wilmans. Cheaper brands may have more.

There is no way to recycle CFLs in South Africa currently, but Eskom has a working group tasked with this issue. CFLs last so long that before the bulb you buy today burns out, even Eskom may have come up with a plan.

A warm, green towel, served medium-well

A friend of mine stopped by yesterday on his way home from shopping for a heated towel rail. He had been fretting for years at his wife’s extravagant use of the tumble dryer simply to warm and dry a single towel before bathing. He worries that tumble dryers use vast amounts of electricity. I used to have a similar affliction, until my tumble dryer broke down last year. I simply didn’t bother to repair it, and I have been a happy man ever since.

The towel rail my friend wants to buy, he told me, uses about as much electricity as a single light bulb, or 100 watts. Though my friend is a former maths teacher, I wasn’t convinced that he had done his calculations.

Heated towel rails are designed to run constantly; they generally don’t come with timers or thermostats, other than a safety shut-off to prevent overheating. If he runs this towel rail constantly for a year it will consume 876 kilowatt hours of electricity and add nearly a ton of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. In my house, that would mean a 10 percent jump in total consumption most months. And at the rates just proposed by the Johannesburg municipality for the coming year, the towel rail would increase his annual electricity bill more than R350. If rates triple over the next several years, as predicted by some experts, the annual cost would approach R1000.

Tumble dryers use roughly 2000 to 3000 watts. That’s terrible. But presuming that his wife doesn’t leave the tumble dryer running all day to keep her towel warm and dry, it might use less electricity than the towel rail. Run a 2500 watt tumble drier for a 30 minutes a day and it will use less than half the electricity—and contribute half the carbon dioxide—of  a round-the-clock towel rail.

That’s still not good for the environment, however. The almost-environmentally-friendly solution is to have an electrician install the towel rail with a switch and a timer and then use it a few hours a day in the winter and turn it off entirely in the summer. The hundreds of rand you will save each year will easily pay for the timer. The problem with this solution is that it contributes to load-shedding because it will add to your electricity consumption at the exact morning and evening peak hours when Eskom has no spare capacity.

If you really can’t see a way to keep your spouse happy without warm towels—and I am very conscious that sometimes we must compromise to avoid marital misery—I suggest trying the microwave oven. WARNING: YOU CAN BURN YOUR SKIN OR EVEN START A FIRE IF YOU HEAT A TOWEL IN THE MICROWAVE FOR TOO LONG. I would not even attempt this in a microwave without a digital timer, and children should not be allowed to try this unsupervised. For my 750-watt microwave oven, 30 seconds warms a small towel nicely and 45 seconds heats a large bath-sheet towel to perfection. Thirty seconds at 750 watts is a mere 2 percent of the electricity used by a 100-watt towel rail in 3 hours. If you don’t have a doting lover on hand to run the warm towel from the kitchen, warm two towels for 30 seconds each and wrap one inside the other to keep warm while you bath or shower. Just because I’m opposed to global warming doesn’t mean that I don’t support wet-body warming.

GreenerHouse has made the short list for the 2008 South African Blog Awards in the category of Green Blogs. If you think this is the best environmental blog in South Africa, and believe that more South Africans should be exposed to the ideas and information found on Greenerhouse, click on the button to the right. A nomination will bring this site to the attention of many people who might not otherwise hear about it. There’s no money in it for me, but the posts I write for Greenerhouse are only worth the time I spend on them if lots of South Africans get to read them.

The voting process is simpler than the rather tricky nominating process, I promise. Voting concludes on the 19th of March.

One is greener than the other

This week I took delivery of a 48 kg cylinder of liquid propane gas. This may seem odd, because I only use gas for heating in the winter. (I wrote about this here.)

But it was all part of a plan. Because burning LPG purchased in the summer may be about the only way to use a fossil fuel at virtually no cost to the environment. That’s right, no net carbon dioxide emissions, sulfur dioxide or any other nasties will be released into the atmosphere as I stay warm burning this gas in the coming winter.

The logic is this: LPG is a byproduct of the refining process. Wherever petrol is made from oil, gas or coal in South Africa, some LPG is produced. As a friend a Sasol first told me, in the summer, when LPG demand is down, these plants run out of storage capacity for LPG and frequently flare it. So if I work on the assumption that my new bottle of gas would have been flared into the atmosphere anyway, I can burn it with a clean conscience.

I planned ahead for this moment back in August, when one gas bottle was depleted. I always have one spare 48 kg cylinder on hand, and replace an empty as soon as I switch over. But two weeks into August I did some quick calculations and figured there was no way my new bottle would run out before warm weather arrived.

Of course, if South Africa had a rational, competitive market, LPG prices would come down in the summer, everyone would have a financial incentive to plan ahead and buy gas in the summer, and flaring of LPG would come to an end. But anyone who buys bread or has a bank account in this country knows that we do not have a rational, competitive market.

So should I buy more LPG bottles to get me through the winter? I don’t know. I worry that South Africa could run into a gas-cylinder shortage this winter. So many people are switching to gas for cooking because they no longer trust Eskom. I will try to investigate the gas-bottle supply situation before winter arrives. If it looks good, I will buy an extra bottle and let you know.

My article on televisions and electricity consumption is now available on the Mail & Guardian website at this link. The previous post contains all of the practical advice that a television buyer could glean from the article, but the original text does provide more context. It also includes a salient comment by Professor Ernst Uken, head of the Energy Institute at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology.

Uken says households play a larger role in the South African power crisis than their overall consumption would suggest. The morning and evening spikes in power usage are caused by the domestic sector, he says, “and spikes are the reason for the power outages. The tail is wagging the dog.”

Perhaps you have heard of Moore’s Law. Named after the founder of Intel, Gordon Moore, it states that computing power of integrated circuits doubles every two years. In the latest issue of the Mail & Guardian, I have introduced what shall heretofore be known as Boroughs’s Law. Named after the founder of Greenerhouse, Don Boroughs, it states that for each additional ten inches in flat-panel television screen size, its electricity consumption approximately doubles.

I discovered this law by plotting the consumption of TVs sold in South Africa on a graph, and it’s the most important thing you need to know when buying a television. Because just to look at it, you might think that a 50 inch TV—manufacturers measure these things on the diagonal in inches—would use 20 percent more electricity than a 40 inch TV. You would be wrong.

Forty-inch TVs shouldn’t use more than 250 watts. (The worst ones use more.) Fifty-inch TVs typically use 500 watts, more than six 60-watt lamps. Boroughs’s Law works all the way through the range of television sizes available in South Africa, from 20 inches to 60 inches.

This tells you that the first thing to do is when buying a television is to convince your partner—or yourself—that you can get by with a TV one size smaller than the one you have been considering. A 32-inch LCD TV, which would have been considered large not many years ago, should use a reasonable 150 watts. That’s not much more than the average large CRT TV—the kind of TV we’ve all been using for the past few decades—and even less than the least efficient CRTs. (Cathode Ray Tubes.) Sony sells a 20-inch LCD which uses an amazing 60 watts. The incredible efficiency of LCD screens at small sizes—and only at small sizes—explains why they are the greenest choice for computer screens.

Once you have decided on a size, there is still a wide range of power consumption, even within the same brand of television. Thirty-two inch TVs, for example, vary in consumption from 132 watts to 380 watts. Televisions should come with big labels stating their consumption, and one day they will. In the meantime, there are only two ways of learning the wattage of a television: through the internet or checking the label on the back of the TV. If you are researching from home, try these websites:

www.philips.co.za
www.sony.co.za
www.samsung.co.za

Once you find a TV that interests you on the web page, click on “technical specifications,” or similar wording. The wattage is usually hidden near the bottom of the list.

You should be able to find a 32-inch TV using 140 watts, a 42-inch screen using 240 watts, or a 46-inch model using 270 watts. LCD TVs tend to use less electricity than plasma TVs. If you really feel that you must have a larger TV, the only models that use acceptable amounts of power are rear-projection TVs. Experts say that their picture quality is as good as flat-panels, they cost a lot less, and the Sony models use about 200 watts, all the way up to a 60-inch screen. They are bulkier, however, and will not be available for too much longer, as they are losing the battle for market share. This may lead to close-out bargains.

If you don’t want to sift through a hundred models, I suggest starting with the Philips brand, as they tend to be more energy efficient. I would avoid LG, as they tend to be more power-hungry and they often don’t state the wattage on the label at the rear of the TV. If you like Sony, and money isn’t much of an object, the European Imaging & Sound Association gave its most recent Green Television of the Year award to the Sony KDL-40D3000. That exact model isn’t available in South Africa, but its local equivalent is the 40-inch D Series Bravia model KLV-40D300A, which uses 180 watts.

Their voting panel looks at ease of recycling and other environmental issues in addition to electricity consumption, so this should be an all-around good choice if you need a big TV.

Or of course you could just stick with your existing CRT television. I checked my 2-year-old, 29-inch Philips CRT television, and it uses 73 watts. If you use an older TV, it is doubly important that you switch it off at the box, rather than using the remote to put it into stand-by. (This also reduces the chance of damage from a lightning strike.) Almost all new flat-panel TVs use one watt or less in stand-by, but older TVs draw enough power in stand-by that in a day you may use more electricity not watching TV than you do watching it.

Any golden white elephants—or rhinos—in your house?

In recent days, the gold price is breaking record after record. Add to that the somewhat weaker rand, and your jewelry box is starting to look like, well, a gold mine.

If you decide to take some profits on a rarely worn bracelet, as I recently did, the environment will benefit even more than your bank account. In November, dozens of South African corporations released data on their greenhouse-gas emissions as part of the South African Carbon Disclosure Project. They should be commended for their effort. Knowing your emissions is a critical first step toward reducing them. Two of the companies were gold miners, and their disclosure came as a shock to me. For each ounce of gold produced by Harmony Gold Mining, 2.1 tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere. Yes, read it again, 2.1 tons of CO₂ for an ounce of gold. If you don’t believe me, see here.

AngloGold Ashanti had significantly lower figures, probably because it is less dependent on deep underground mines in South Africa, but the average of the two companies still comes out at 1.14 tons per troy ounce. This is not far off from a figure I got using data for the South African gold mining industry as a whole in the year 2000, 1.3 tons of CO₂ per troy ounce for electricity usage alone.

Using the 1.14 figure, by my calculations, I would have to drive my Honda Jazz from Johannesburg to Cape Town and back about three times to emit the carbon dioxide contained in a Krugerrand. (And I’m leaving aside the water pollution, local air pollution, and landscape scarring that gold mining causes.)

This might give you some pause when your anniversary next comes up, but it does make the current high gold price a perfect opportunity to recycle some gold and prevent further mining emissions. I found a medal that had no real sentimental value and my wife found a clunky bracelet that she hadn’t worn in more than 20 years. Yesterday, a gold and coin dealer paid me more than R4,000 for the two, thereby saving 783 kilograms of CO₂ using to the Anglo/Harmony average. It was like buying a carbon offset, except I got paid for it. I’m considering going back with a pair of silver candlesticks.

I remember that driving all the way to Bedfordview just to sell a little gold gave me a twinge of green guilt. Not anymore. I now realize I could have driven all the way to Bulawayo.

My article on Collect-a-Can is now available on the Mail & Guardian website at this link.

Why are these men smiling? A wheelbarrow full of cans will only get them R2.86 at Collect-a-Can.

My article in the current issue of the Mail & Guardian points out that Collect-a-Can is not living up to its reputation as an energetic catalyst for recycling in South Africa. Instead of paying a premium price to the hawkers who clean up our trash looking for recyclables, Collect-a-can is paying less than the market price and profiting on the export of cans to steel mills in Pakistan.

So where does that leave the consumer who wants to do the right thing with his or her cans? One lesson I have learned is that food cans are actually somewhat more recyclable than drink cans. The food tins that make it to Collect-a-Can have their tin removed for reuse and are melted back into high-quality steel here in South Africa. Drink cans are not likely to end up as new drink cans. They meet a variety of fates, including being used to process cobalt in Botswana and going into lower-quality steels.

I know that the temptation is stronger to throw out a food tin, because of food stuck inside. I pulled one out of my kitchen bin just yesterday. Resist. All of your tins are worth recycling. Aluminium tins, including some deodorant and hair-care aerosols, are by far the most recyclable of all. I have written about this before.

I will continue to recycle drink cans as well. I would prefer “cradle-to-cradle” recycling, which means that the end product is of the same quality as the original, but this is not always possible. Converting hiqh-quality South African steel into lower-quality steel in Pakistan or even into a flux used to process cobalt in Botswana is better than wasting the resource entirely. Since global warming is indeed “global,” it doesn’t matter too much whether the energy is saved in Pakistan or Vanderbijlpark. (From the point of view of Eskom’s crisis, it does matter, but there is little you or I can do to resolve technical steelmaking issues.)

At the shops, if you must decide between disposable plastic, glass and steel packaging for beverages, there is not a strong reason to choose one over the other, so buy the one that is easiest for you to recycle. You might experiment by leaving a bag of each next to your dustbins on collection morning and see which (if any) a hawker will take. I know they will take aluminium and office paper, but in my neighbourhood, the ordinary bottles and cans are usually left alone. So I deliver them to my municipal Pikitup depot when I take grass clippings and leaves for composting. Please report back to Greenerhouse what the street collectors will take in your suburb.

Glass collection bins are becoming easier to find, thanks to The Glass Recycling Company, which has a list of bottle banks here. PET is more valuable per kilogram than any of them, though a kilogram of PET takes up a lot more space. Better by far is to find returnable glass bottles, which are available for the most popular brands from SAB Miller and Coca-Cola. And best of all, of course, is tap water.

The Mail & Guardian has now put the full, uncut version of my diesel article on their website. Click here to read it.