Own Alone

The news today tells us that circulation is up in Maryland libraries. Instead of buying books, going to movies, renting videos, or otherwise spending money on alternative leisure time activities, people are returning to the old-fashioned, tried-and-true free resources of their local libraries.

The simple experience of walking into our library offers a glimpse of successful community-sharing we rarely notice and hardly ever celebrate. This is a place we all can come for pleasure, growth, leisure, company. Even more, there is a physical bond that it establishes between us. The books that I check out today might have been in your lap yesterday. The book I hold today may be toted about in your bag next month. I for one bemoan the loss of the Due Date sheet in the back of the book. It told me a bit of the history of the travels of the book, but even more, a bit of the interests of my community. I felt closer to my neighbors back in those days.

But this reminded me of something more I learned this past week that astonished me. In Europe, or so I am told, people do not own their hot water heaters. They only lease them. After all, it was explained to me, people don't really want hot water heaters. They want hot water. Yet to buy a hot water heater, which is the only way to get hot water here in the states, means a ten year investment, locking out the benefits of advances in technology and energy efficiency that develops over those ten years. No one is invested in the upkeep (companies even make money in the repairs) and no one cares where the broken, old heater goes after its useful life. No wonder we have such a waste-rich economy.

In Europe, the company owns the hot water heater, is responsible for its upkeep, is incentivized to have them be the most efficient (or the customer will rent from a competitor), and is responsible for taking them back and properly disposing of them, or better, recycling much of them, at the end of their usable life.

Indeed, why do we need to own things we don't want just to get the stuff they produce? What if we could buy the use of things to get the results we want without the burden of ownership, inefficiency, upkeep and waste?

This is a new way of thinking for most of us, and a new model for building sustainable businesses. We do this in some sectors of the marketplace: we lease cars, we rent homes. But what if we expanded that thinking. On the one hand, there should always be free libraries for all the books and films and things we want to read or see or use but don't need or want to own. But what if, for example, when we wanted to own a book, we could download the text of the book to an electronic book and have the book without having its "stuff". Amazon's Kindle works on this principle. The books you purchase for download come right to your hands via your Kindle, but also sit in your Amazon account for reading from any monitor or computer. And nothing of substance changes hands but zeroes and ones (and a bit of money).

Now I will be the first to tell you all the limitations of Kindle, so I am not urging you to go out and buy it. But they are on the right track. As are the outfits that run Zip-cars, the car-sharing company; bike-share groups; handbag swaps; clothing swaps; free-cycle, neighborhood groups that offer for free usable stuff we no longer want; etc.

This new approach of de-coupling the benefits of something from the (permanent) ownership of something promises to emerge as a key player in our reconstructed economy. It will be more affordable, more sustainable, and more efficient. And it will build stronge, caring, mutually-responsible ties among the various members of the community. We just need to open our minds, change our way of thinking, and reconnect .

No There There

Thursdays are magic days. We usually call them trash days, but they often feel like magic. Thursday mornings, my neighbors and I dutifully, and gratefully, shlep our trashcans, full of decaying, odorous debris with seven days’ worth of personal waste, to the bottom of our driveways. We leave it there, and walk away. Poof, when we return, that trash has disappeared.

Our world is once again clean, clear, and more to the nose. Out of sight, out of mind. Gone. Away. And so, in our world of magical thinking, all is good.

That is what we used to think. But today we know this to be wrong. We know now that what goes around, comes around. There is no “away”. There is no there there. No place on earth is unaffected by the detritus and debris that we create through the consumption of our lives. It is reported that the Alaskan Inuit have the world’s highest levels of DDT and PDBs in their bodies – though they live thousands of miles from the sources.

Many of us have begun to respond. We try to limit our waste. We recycle everything from plastic bags to banana peels. And yet, as conscientious as we may be, we still have garbage bags every week to set out on the corner. Commercial packaging is part of the problem. Non-recyclable plastics is another. I suppose unnecessary purchases is a third. And while we can control the last, we cannot personally control the first two. Which is why living an environmentally friendly, or sustainable, life, is not something we can achieve only by our personal behavior. We need to move the movers, the makers, the manufacturers, merchants and money-lenders. We need to promote and support legislation that requires reduced waste and proper disposal.


Anthony Cortese, a former Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and now president of Second Nature (www.secondnature.org), tells us that as Americans, we “consume the equivalent of our body weight in solid materials daily, over 94% of which goes to waste before we ever see the product or service. It takes about 2000 pounds of material, most of which went to waste, to make a laptop computer.”

The stuff that we personally consume represents only a small portion of the overall waste we are responsible for.

What to do about it? Yes, keep recycling, reducing, reusing. Keep learning and encouraging others to do the same. And, just as much, when you do go shopping, make your purchases make a statement. Buy products from manufacturers who work to reduce the waste stream they create from production, to packaging, to transportation to disposal.

Watch this fun 20 minute video to learn about moving from a linear, unsustainable production model to a cyclical, sustainable production model. The Story of Stuff (www.storyofstuff.com).

Then before you make your next purchase, check out the most environmentally friendly products available. For more information on a world of green products, visit www.coopamerica.org. Get their Green Pages. Let your purchases help change the world.

Extreme recycling

I wore a six-year old two-piece dress with a seafoam scoop-neck top to the weddings of my two older sons. I wore the same dress to my two youngest children’s bnai mitzvah celebrations just a few years earlier. I am hoping for more summer simkhas so I can get additional mileage out of it.

I know it is part of the American cultural ritual to buy something new for fancy events, each special occasion occasioning an expansion of the wardrobe. I could justify my recycling of the dress by arguing that with all the money we were already spending, why unnecessarily spend more? Truth be told, though, I liked wearing a previously worn dress.

I liked opening the school books at the beginning of the year and discovering the students from the grades above me whose karma now infused that book, binding me to them and the learning enterprise. I liked it when library books came with cards stamped with due dates that showed how often and how recently a book was taken out. I like buying used books from Amazon’s marketplace, pages smoothed and a little dog-eared by previous readers. Most of our family’s best children’s books are library discards – books once held on the laps of countless parents and children in the most tender moments of discovery. I like buying used wooden furniture studded with round water stains from iced-tea glasses accompanying long summer visits with dear old friends. I like old houses, old handbags, old chinaware.

If I could, I would live in a converted train station – imagining the people, the stories, the hellos and goodbyes, the tears and the pacing, the grumbling and the jokes that people would have told waiting for life’s little adventures to unfold. I would conjure up their voices at night and feel the vitality of life’s tidal forces.

I don’t quite understand the lust for new. New feels incomplete to me, possibilities without the wisdom to guide and temper it. The Old gifted as New seems to me the best of all worlds.

I recently heard of an e-establishment from whom you rent toys instead of buying them. You go on line, choose age-appropriate toys for your kids from this enterprising entrepreneur, use them for however long you want and then return them and get new toys. Kind of like Netflicks for toys.

And there is an outfit that rents handbags for a night.

I was talking with a potter who says that when she is stuck for a gift, she chooses a bowl from her home pottery collection, , washes it off, and Voila, instant gift. I thanked her, for she had liberated my desire to do the same.

Imagine how rich we would be if the stuff we owned was coated with a patina of lives lived fully; if the gifts we gave were crowded with our stories, our memories, our blessings. Imagine if our daily acts were added, layer by layer, onto a tel of tales, a mound of memories captured and held by the stuff of our lives.

the aesthetics of composting

I compost. Not because I garden and not because I want to use the fertile soil I will be creating to make my Eden bloom.
I compost so that I can return to the soil that which came from it. And having no meat in the house makes composting a breeze.

(Warning: if you are an avid composter, do not read on. What follows may be disturbing.)

This is how I compost: I gather the remnants of foodstuffs in a plastic container on my kitchen counter. Pre-cooked food; post-cooked food. Peels, scrapes, leftovers that are otherwise inedible. I then, when the container is sufficiently filled or otherwise looking, uh, ripe for the heap, I take it outdoors and dump it on my compost pile. (I told you this would look coarse and disturbing to trained and committed composters.) Sometimes I cover it with the leaf debris that is lying around; sometimes I don't.

This was working rather well, I thought. But my son and husband thought differently. They were unhappy, shall we say, viewing the compost bowl heap up right in front of their eyes.

Okay. To shield their delicate spirits and sense of cleanliness (dirt is more a cultural definition than a natural one), I tried closed, non-transparent containers. Tin ones with lids seemed promising but rusted. Casseroles seemed too ornate for my needs; and a mis-use of kitchen artifcacts. Other containers didn't have lids.

Then, I had an idea. I was going to Annapolis to participate in the annual Environmental Action Day, where we learn about that year's major legislative agendas, as set by the alliance of Maryland environmental organizations, and meet with our legislators. The good thing about going to Annapolis, besides doing this good work, is that right across from the entrance to the Governor's mansion is the best little pottery shop.

What if I found a great pot with a snug fitting lid that was not too heavy or too expensive or too big that could hold 2-3 days worth of compost, all the while sitting beautifully and stealthily on the counter, hiding the detritus within?

Well, pottery is, as you may imagine, expensive. So none of the wares on display worked for me. But I approached one of the workers, who is part of the coop and thus also a potter, and asked if perchance there were any seconds, rejects, in the back that I could buy for this less-than-presentable purpose. Indeed, she said, there were. So into the back we went. I found a 10 inch high, five inch diameter cylindrical post, resembling a utensil holder that would sit comfortably on any kitchen counter. For the life of me, I could not find the flaw. Except, it didn't have a lid.

No problem. My friendly potter disappeared in the far back from whence pottery rummaging noises came. She emerged, beaming. She had found a lid (they had a whole box back there of orphaned lids, that is, lids whose bases had broken) which she thought might just fit perfectly onto the top of this beautiful but cheap pot. We both held our breath as she gently slide the lid across the mouth of this pot. Voila! A magical, if a bit over-hung, lid nestled smoothly onto the pot.

So I got a cheap but lovely compost container which duplicitously sits beside my flour cannister with a slightly over-sized lip on its lid and a swirl of a handle to ease access to the earthly dankness going on inside.

No one fusses anymore about my composting. And I get double pleasure in its storage and on the trek to return it to its rightly home.

one percent non-solution

I often wonder how much energy it takes to make a bag that I may use for 10 minutes. Let's say I go to the drug store, get shampoo, vitamins and make-up and check out. The cashier puts that stuff in a bag. I drive home - 2 miles - take the stuff out of the bag and then throw the bag away. That return trip, with the brand new bag, took about 7 minutes. So, this bag that took oodles of resources and energy to make and get to me, went from treasure to trash in 10 minutes.

Okay, so let's say it don't throw it away, but recycle it. I put it in my "bag of bags" and take it to Giant next time I go, and put it in their bag receptacle. Now, there is a difference of opinion as to where this Bag-of-Bags goes. Some folks - including workers at Giant - say it is thrown in with the trash. But even assuming it gets recycled, I am still not so happy.

After all, there are, we are told, five [linear] stages of merchandising and consuming: extraction (getting the materials out of the earth), manufacturing (making the resources into the stuff we use), merchandising (selling it to us), consuming (using it) and disposal (getting rid of it somehow). In between, by the way, is all the transportation and trucking and shipping and driving that moves the stuff from place to place.

Recycling only affects the first and last. Manufacturing, merchandising, consuming and transportation remain. Which is why we say the first step in limiting pollution and waste is Reducing what we use. So even if all the plastic bags were biodegradable, we should still make it a habit of shopping with cloth, reusable bags.

But there is more. I just watched a piece on the lifecycle of stuff - you can see it at http://www.storyofstuff.com/

There is an astonishing, horrifying, piece of information there: Guess how much of the stuff that is made today will still be in use six months from now. The number is horrifying: 1%.

Now, even if she - the narrator of the Story of Stuff - is off by a factor of ten, and even if "in use" is a big vague as a category, it is still an astonishing figure. But think about it: all the food we eat, and the packaging it comes in. The candy, the tchotchkes we buy, the paper and ink and pens and napkins; the cups and covers and other disposables we use at McDonalds and Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. The batteries, the cleaners, the oil. The newspapers, cardboard boxes and styrofoam peanuts. So much more than I can even imagine right now.

And it points to a great truth. We use more stuff than we need to. Imagine if all that money we spent on stuff went to fair wage salaries and rebuilding our nation's infrastructure. (I have written of this before so I will spare you now.)

We focus so much on recycling, and that is not bad. But we also need to focus on the other two "R's": reducing and reusing.

Maybe that should be our next big push. The world seems to have begun with reducing (or banning) plastic bags and water bottles. Let's keep the momentum going!

modern-day rags

a quick observation: in the early years of American Jewish life, many Jews made their living, and some their fortunes, on waste. in those days, waste was mostly scrap metal and rags.

today, one hundred years later, more and more Jews seem to be entering the waste management field. not a sexy field, it nonetheless will form the foundation of a new environmental economy. someone is going to have to pick up, reclaim and recycle all that stuff that we no longer want to throw away but no longer want to keep either.

and hopefully, there are many of us also at the other end of the spectrum, creating materials and processes that allow us from the very beginnings of a design of a product to build in an environmentally sound method of recylcing, reclaiming and re-using.

and there is no question that many of us are there in the big middle: buying and using all this stuff.

e-books

Once upon a time, I loved books. What is more romantic than floor to ceiling bookshelves, lining entire walls stocked with a universe of books. Big books, little books, fat ones and slender ones, bright ones and dark ones. Sliding ladders that promise access to the elusive upper levels, step-stools that enable you not only to reach up for a book just out of reach, but to sit down to browse books toeing the edges of the floor. While I am not lucky enough to enjoy the extravagance, or gift, or indulgence of a high-storied, brimming home library, I do have bookcases in my foyer, my office, our den (both of them) and even our bedroom. I would venture to guess that we have more built-in bookcases in our bedroom than most people have in their entire homes.

And yet, today, after yesterday's adventures in housecleaning, I find myself with four bags of books I will be toting around. Two bags of books I hope to give away to general used-book fairs (if anyone will take them and use them), one bag to Jewish libraries (if they will take them) and one bag of books to return to a university library. So, on a sustainability count: how do we best handle old, unwanted books (you cannot recycle hardbound books)? I have to hope that all that paper will somehow be recaptured, although most likely the used books will be thrown away. And no matter where I take them, I have to plan a most efficient route to limit the amount of gasoline I use to redistribute these books.

As much as I love owning books (and when put on bookcase on an outer wall - they serve as great insulation!), I have begun to yearn for an aesthetically pleasing, easily portable, all-purpose e-book. How great it would be if I could hold a sensuously designed "book" and read any paper, any magazine, and any book from any library anywhere in the world at a place anywhere I am in the world. Downloadable both via the internet AND via satellite anywhere that satellites work.

Used books - indeed all currently existing books of any value - would increase in value as this old technology of paper became a way of the past. We would save enormous amounts of resources from trees, to waste in producing paper (even recycled paper) to transportation of the raw materials, the paper from the mill, the books from the printer and the trip to the used-book fairs or the dump.

Not only that, access to knowledge would increase - for I could both graphically, and affordably, get many more publications and books than I can both physically and financially afford now.

Perhaps if I live long enough I will see it. For that day is coming - and even us early nay-sayers or doubters will come to see that the act of reading can remain sensually satisfying and intellectually fulfilling, and still be enviromentally sound.

Hurry! We are waiting.

if someone asks you...

If someone asks you, "okay, what can I do to help the environment?", start them with easy steps.

here are five:

Reduce your water heater temperature setting by 5 degrees

Buy five canvas bags and use them wherever and whenever you go into a store. (Not just at a grocery store. Any and every store where they would otherwise give you a disposable bag.)

Drive five less miles every week. (And if they can, ask them to drive five less miles three days every week!)

Keep showers to under five minutes.

Change five light bulbs to energy efficient ones. (If they have changed all of theirs, have them go to work on their parents, children, friends.)

Oh, and one more. Talk to five friends about the importance of changing personal behavior to be more environmentally sustainable.

proper orientation

I am basking in the blessings of passive solar heating. The thermostat is set for 67. The air outside is 25 - the coldest day of the winter by far. And my office feels like 71 or 72 (more in the part where I did not pull down the shade). On the brightest days, the glory of the sun bleaches out my computer screen so completely that I have to move (or read a book instead!). In the summer, the towering beech, elm and poplar trees block the rays so the room is bright but not blinding.

We were not so wise as to orient the house this way. It was like this when we bought it: front facing south framed by large, gracious trees. But we did build this room. And it is the one I spend most of my time in at home. Daily I am reminded of the subtle ways we can work with the earth to enjoy its rhythms, and blend them with ours.

Which leads me to believe that those of us who are living with pre-existing structures and therefore limited abilities to make them totally sustainable nonetheless have options and opportunities to upgrade them to green. When we renovate, buy furniture, replace windows or a furnace, we can do our bit. Even before that, we can plant trees, wear great sweaters. (We can even learn how to make them and simplify yet enhance our gifting. Start with scarves -much needed and much easier.)

And then there is our stuff. I cleaned bookshelves and clothes closets today. I will ache tomorrow, I know. But I now have bags of things to give away. That is the good part. The thing I wonder about is - why and how did I get all that stuff? Did I really need all those tops when I bought them? Were those books and gifts all necessary? Wouldn't I have been just as pleased if a gift had been given to a good cause in my name? My brother has begun giving to Jewish Women's International on Mother's Day in the name of all the women in his life. So instead of wasting money on hothouse flowers or candy or tchotchkes - all of which seem sweet until they die, get consumed in abundance or need to be dusted or moved - he uses this opportunity to do what he would not have done otherwise - help battered women put their lives back together.

We don't speak enough about conservation these days. And certainly not about our consuming habits. It is downright dangerous to the American economy to promote buying less. But what kind of long-term healthy economy can we have if it is predicated on digging more stuff out of the earth, or even recycling and making more than we truly need (that too creates production waste, transportation waste, packaging waste, etc). What if we built an economy on the minimum of goods consumption and the maximum of service consumption: paying teachers more; recruiting more nurses; getting more social workers to watch after children-at-risk; hiring more home health aides to care for the elderly who choose and are able to age-in-place with a little help from some friends and aides.

What if we shifted our GNP from counting mostly stuff produced to counting hours people actually helped and worked with each other?

What would happen then?