Thanksgiving Special Green Tip #50: Green Football

It gives me great pleasure to be able to bring to you two very special things in this very blog entry. First of all, it's the Fiftieth Green Tip! It seems like just yesterday that I was telling everyone that they should hitchhike so they don't breathe out as much carbon dioxide. Oh, those were the good ole days.

And secondly, it's the fourth part of my four part series on how to celebrate Thanksgiving in a Green way! Today I'll be talking about one of America's great pastimes: football. Now, football as a sport is not necessarily a Brown activity. Yes, it's true that the ball is usually leather and leather making is not necessarily the most environmentally process, but I'd be willing to overlook that for today. No, I'm not here to try to fix the sport. After all, it does encourage open green spaces that use real grass (at the high school level) and I can't complain about more grass being planted.

No, what Green Tip #50 deals with is the much less active activity of watching football. It's no secret that TV's use electricity (if that is news to you, we need to sit down and have a long talk). Sometimes they use too much electricity, some lawmakers in California have even said by passing a law putting efficiency limits on TV's in the state. When you consider how long some football games go, the amount of electricity that's being used can really add up. And think about how many times you've fallen asleep during a particularly boring game after eating way too much turkey. That's another few hours of the TV being on.

So what are your options? I mean, you can't miss the big game, can you?? No! And it's just not the same watching the scores update on your computer (like I'm doing with the Toledo-Bowling Green game. Go Rockets!) And radios are so 40 years ago. Next time you want to watch the big game, here's what you do. Go dust off that old hand crank powered radio and get 22 of your best friends together and have them reenact the game as it's going. It shouldn't be too hard for them. And besides, if you're a Cleveland Browns fan, your friends will probably be better players than your favorite professional players. (Sorry, I know taking shots at a team that is 1-9 right now is a little cheap. But they lost to the Detroit Lions. The Lions!)

Anyway, this one's a bit short because I'm still worn out from my early morning shopping. I'll be back to my regular Tuesday-Friday schedule starting next week. And hopefully you enjoyed the double dose of Green Tips because I'll probably do this again around Christmastime. Have a safe trip home! (Or not if you decided to stay in and spend the holidays with your robot clone family.)

Thanksgiving Special Green Tip #49: Green Holiday Shopping

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Let's get right into Green Tip #49 because I know you'd rather spend time with friends and loved ones.

Tomorrow Americans partake in a time honored tradition that truly embodies the spirit of the American culture: getting up really early and waiting in line in freezing temperatures to save an extra $10 on a pair of jeans. While I'm sure that you can find other blogs that will give you some tips on what to buy in order to be an environmentally responsible shopper, The Impractical Green Resource is not other blogs. No, I'd like to give some tips on how to make your Black Friday shopping experience as Green as possible.

First off, you're going to want to address the issue of waiting in line in the cold. While it might not necessarily be freezing where you live, it's a safe bet that wherever you are, it's not exactly going to be very warm in late November at 3 AM. Some people bring electric blankets, some use electric hand warmers, some have electric space heaters. I think you see where I'm going with this. We use electricity a lot for situations like this. Here's my suggestion on how to cut back on energy use. Go to the hospital, find someone with the flu, and try to catch it from him or her. If you get a fever, you'll be burning up and you won't need any electric heaters or anything.

Now, the type of disease you get doesn't matter that much. I'd suggest H1N1, just because it's so chic right now. And there's nothing more embarrassing than having last year's flu. You'd be so out of style.

Additional bonus: if you make it really obvious that you're highly contagious, you might just scare some people out of their coveted positions in line.

Another aspect of waiting in line for amazing deals is that some people (the diehards) will actually camp out days in advance. If you'd rather not waste gas by driving to some far off destination to go camping with your family, you can convince them that this is what you're doing. Just keep them in the tent the entire night and they might just believe that you actually went to North Dakota to go camping. Just say that there's a blizzard out and they can't leave the tent until the storm passes. Then when the store does open, sure they'll be mad, but they'll forget about how mad they are when you buy them a brand new Xbox.

So that about wraps it up for now. Don't forget to come back tomorrow and I'll talk about a Green alternative to watching football all weekend.

Thanksgiving Special Green Tip #48: Green Thanksgiving Dinner

Welcome back! It feels so weird to be writing this on a Wednesday. But climate change doesn't take a vacation, so neither should I. Today I'll be talking about something that is probably the essence of this holiday: overeating.

You've probably heard a lot about Green foods like free range beef and organic mashed potatoes and soy turkey and mycoprotein turkey and all that good. Well, there's a good thing and a bad thing about this whole organic food movement. The good thing is that they are usually much healthier than foods that are more Brown (not environmentally friendly). The bad thing is that they usually taste HORRIBLE! (oh, don't deny it you hippies) This can be illustrated by the following axiom:

The IGR Green Food Axiom #1:
The Greener (or healthier) a food is, the worse it tastes. This can be seen in figure 1.

Figure 1

So what is the environmentally conscious chef to do when preparing a Thanksgiving meal but want people to be able to actually finish their meals? I like to use the rule of ten. Place your food on the line above and see what the Green Factor is. For example, let's look at organic mashed potatoes. You can see that the Green Factor for them is about a 35. Not too bad. Divide that 35 by 10 and you get 3.5. This is the ratio of gravy or sauce you want to use to drown out the bad taste. So use about 3 and a half times as much gravy as organic mashed potatoes and you're in good shape. Regular turkey falls at about a 1:1 ratio, which is pretty accurate.

Ah, mycoprotein turkey substitute. Let's address you for a minute. For those of you that have not heard of that, do yourself a favor and don't look it up. It's gross and that's all you need to know. Trust me. You're going to want to load that up with a 9:1 ratio of gravy to 'turkey.' And that might not even be enough. It's really up to you.

Let me give you a real example that comes from my experiences hanging out with the environmentally conscious crowd during my college career. I've had tofu and it was really gross. I mean, if you can't figure that out just from looking at it, you need help. But I found out that tofu chili is actually pretty good. The difference? The tomato sauce and cheese and other chili ingredients were probably in a 4 or 5 to 1 ratio with the tofu. See, the rule of ten works again!

Alright everyone, hopefully that will give you some ideas when you're preparing your dinner for tomorrow. If you're not passed out from eating too much, check back in tomorrow and I'll have some ideas for how to be environmentally friendly while shopping during Black Friday. Enjoy your days off and make sure you take a minute to remember how thankful you are for the things you have in your life, like headlamps and giant solar reflectors in Asia and robot clones of your family.

Thanksgiving Special Green Tip #47: Green Holiday Travel

*sniff sniff* Do you smell that? Ah yes, it's the smell of turkeys roasting in the oven and pumpkin pies.

Take that turkey out of the oven! You've still got two days! It'll be WAY overdone by Thanksgiving!

But that smell does mean that today is the first in my four part series about how to celebrate a Greener Thanksgiving! Today I'll be sharing with you my secrets for Greener Holiday Travel.

Now, if you're like me and most of the country, you live pretty far away from at least some members of your family. So whether they're coming in to visit you or you're going out of town to visit them, you can only imagine what kind of a toll this extra transportation will take on the environment. All that jet fuel burning or car exhaust or train smoke or whatnot. At the rate we're releasing carbon emissions all of the turkeys might be killed off by Global Warming by next Thanksgiving! So what's the best option for the environmentally conscious traveler? Trains? Buses? Carpooling?

Nope! It's to build robot clones of your loved ones! Now, I know it sounds crazy, but it might just work. Depending on how many you can afford, just select several of your favorite relatives and have robots made that look and act just like them. This means you won't have to emit any more carbon emissions driving or flying out of town! And this is good for all holidays, not just Thanksgiving.

It may be a bit steep price-wise, but think of it as an investment. You can spend a few thousand dollars now (or million, who knows how much robot clones really cost) or you can spend that much over the course of your life traveling here and there. And that means you can sell your car, as you won't need to travel. Well, really, you'll need to sell your car in order to afford the robots, so that works out.

But wait! There's more! This isn't an environmental benefit, so to speak, but I've often mentioned how robots are going to take over the world one day. So it would seem weird that I'd endorse making more robots to put in this world. But the way I see it is that if it's inevitable that you will be a slave to a robot one day, why not make the robots look like your parents? That way nothing will change. Only instead of yelling at you because you broke curfew or didn't clean your room, they'll be yelling at you to work harder in the endrium mines so they can build more robot warriors!

Happy Thanksgiving Eve Eve everyone! Make sure to come back tomorrow when I'll be explaining how to cook a Green Thanksgiving Meal (use green food coloring, of course! Sorry... Lame... I know.)

Another Side Note

Hey everybody! Make sure you check in every day this week (excluding today) as I will be writing a 4 part series on how to enjoy your Thanksgivings in a more Green way!

Tuesday: Green Holiday Traveling
Wednesday: Green Thanksgiving Dinner
Thursday: Green Black Friday Shopping (I know it's confusing. Just go with it.)
Friday: Green Football

Now everyone has something to be thankful for this Thursday: double the Green Tips!

And for those of you not in the USA and are confused about what Thanksgiving is, just pretend I said 'Founders Day' or 'Independence Day' or some such thing. Oh, and replace football with cricket or um... football. But in the way that everyone in the world uses it (soccer).

Green Tip #46: Global Warming is Good

Let's talk about viruses. Ah yes, the unassuming little things that have killed more people than all the serial killers in the world combined. With all of the talk about H1N1 and HIV and SARS and Keanu Reeves' acting career, I figure I should address how these very simple organisms are able to infect perfectly good hosts (or movies) and reek havoc causing mayhem and destruction.

So a virus is basically a little sac of DNA that latches onto a perfectly healthy cell and injects this DNA into the host. The host cell then dies and new viruses rupture out of the cell's corpse like the monster from 'Alien' popped out of the guy's chest. Then the new viruses go on to infect other cells. This cycle repeats itself until the host organism's defenses are able to fight back. (No, lining up colored pills on the viruses is not one of the body's defenses. 10 points to anyone who gets that reference.) One of the ways that the host fights back is by raising its body temperature, thus giving it a fever. This increased body temperature makes a hostile environment for the viruses and helps to speed up the virus's demise. Usually the body is able to fight off the virus, other times the host doesn't survive and the virus is trapped in the dead host and eventually is starved for living cells and dies out itself. Ha, stupid virus, it loses either way!

But wait... If you think back to the movie 'The Matrix,' (I've mentioned it before in Green Tip #2 when referring to how robots will take over the world) you'll remember how Agent Smith compares humans to a virus. We've essentially broken past the limits that nature naturally (isn't everything in nature natural?) sets for species that makes populations decline when resources are scarce. We kept expanding beyond our resources and now have no natural predators.

Go us, right? No, not quite... If you think of planet earth as an organism, it would be safe to say that Global Warming is her getting a fever trying to kill us off. Yup, the human race is now officially those drunk people that don't realize they're being completely inappropriate at weddings and won't take a hint that they should leave. We're unwanted...

But it doesn't have to end this way. What if we were to mutate (so to speak) into a harmless strain? Even better yet, what if we took a cue from the adeno-associated virus type 2? This virus infects humans and other primates and causes no known disease. Better yet, some studies have shown that this virus can actually help to fight some forms of cancer.

So Green Tip #46 is this: let's use Global Warming as a challenge for us to be better viruses. Think about what actions to you take and whether you're acting like HIV or more like AAV2. Let's hope for all of our sakes that you choose AAV2.

Green Tip #45: You Can't Take It With You

Every so often, the Green Tips posted in the Impractical Green Resource will bring up serious questions about what the best course of action will be in a situation. For example, what is the environmentally conscious person supposed to do when it comes to dining out? Green Tip #45 will address that issue using some of the previous Green Tips to back it up.

First off, let me say this. Why are you even thinking about eating out in the first place? Are you not listening to me? Just one week ago, in Green Tip #43, I suggested to everyone that they stay locked away in their homes until spring comes around like a bear trapped in her cave or a celebrity under house arrest.

Okay, I can accept that you might live in a warmer climate and that Green Tip might not apply. If that's the case, what are you going to do when you end up going out to eat and have leftovers? I mean, I just cringe whenever I see those Styrofoam take out boxes littering the side of the streets.

The very observant (and obsessive) reader will know that the two main options can both by covered by previous Green Tips. Option 1 is to follow what Green Tip #4 implicitly states. Sure, go ahead and scarf down the rest of that chicken cacciatore. While I never expressly endorsed being fat as a way to save energy, I did have the opportunity to denounce being fat and I didn't take it. That can be read as saying it's okay to be overweight. And think about how much you can save on your heating bill if you've got a thick layer of blubber.

The other option is to take it home with you. I know, I know, Styrofoam has been called Satan's excrement because of how bad it is for the environment, but Green Tip #20 has some very good suggestions on what to do with the Styrofoam boxes once you get home. Walking on water = pretty darn cool. Just make sure you wash out the boxes before you use them so you aren't stepping in clam sauce.

So which way is better? The quick answer: neither. If you go back and read Green Tip #6 you will see that there is a third and better option. Simply ask the waiter or waitress which wall is an external wall, and begin stuffing your leftovers in for insulation! Just remember to put the hole higher up on the wall, otherwise you'll have food leaking all over the restaurant. Just don't forget what Green Tip #54 has to say about those extra drinks, otherwise you'll run into more problems than just weird looks!

What? The link doesn't work? Okay, don't worry about it. It'll work someday.

Green Tip #44: WRAWWN Part 1, Plastic

Let me clear something up right away. WRAWWN, while it does sound like a sound a baby dinosaur might make, is in fact an acronym. Without further ado, here's the first part of a brand new feature that I'll be doing from time to time.

What Resource Are We Wasting Now? Part 1, Plastic

Let me just differentiate this and the Landfill Reductions that I've done. WRAWWN is all about how not to use some basic material or water or energy or something like that. The Landfill Reductions talk about what to do with something once it's been used.

Enough chitchat, let's save the planet!

Straws?? Really?? I mean COME ON! Think of all the plastic that we're wasting! Here's the situation that must have come up the first time a fast food restaurant put a straw in their drinks. Some hugely overweight man probably complained to the restaurant that he was just too darn tired to pick up his drink. And thus the straw was born. I mean, seriously? How lazy are we that we can't even pick up our drinks? Although, with the size of drinks these days, we would probably be building some muscles by lifting the cups.

Another waste of plastic is how much they use to wrap up small electronics. Next time you're at a store that sells USB drives, check out how much plastic is on them. There's probably ten times as much plastic wrapping as there is USB drive. Do we REALLY need to have it secured by enough plastic that we can put carpeting down and charge rent for people to stay in it?? Not to mention that it's impossible to get off, but that only hurts the environment if I take out my frustration by drop kicking squirrels.

And finally, retail stores need to lighten up a bit. I don't know if you're like me or not, but I always forget to bring my canvas bags to the store and I end up having to use plastic bags (ugh). Well, I tried to be smart and wore a trench coat with deep pockets so I could use that instead of bags. I was just trying to save Toys 'R Us some bags, and the next thing I know I'm not allowed to shop there any more. Something about shoplifting or being creepy or something like that. Why can't I wear a trench coat whenever I want to?? It's a free country!!

So yeah, plastic.

Green Tip #43: WE DON'T HAVE MUCH TIME!!!

Okay, don't panic.... but you only have a very very small window to get this Green Tip done. Right now (well, in a minute after you read this) go to the store and get the following things:

Spray-on foam
Canned food
Plant lights
Flower pots
Soil
Seeds

Here's why you need all this stuff. There's a very good chance that there's no more warm days left this year. I can't speak for the rest of the country, but here in Toledo, it's been in the 50's and 60's, even getting as high as 67 on Saturday. That's unseasonably warm in an area where the first snowfall can come as early as October.

In the next few days, the weather will probably start getting much colder, so you need to act on this right now. First, open all the windows and bring in all that unseasonable weather. Then, completely seal up all of your windows, doors, and any other cracks with the spray on foam. This will create a nice tight lining on your home or apartment that will keep that warm air in. Yes, it's true, you won't be able to leave your apartment or house until probably April or May, but that's what the other things are for.

You're going to want to grow various things that you can eat, such as tomatoes, carrots, peas, hamburgers (if you find hamburger seeds, save some for me, I can't find them anywhere). You'll have to live off of canned food until the plants are ready, though, so I hope you like canned beets. It's a small price to pay for really low heating bills during the winter.

Added bonus: I like to throw in some added benefits of these Green Tips to make them even more enticing for you to put into practice in your life. The bonus to this one is that when the world ends on December 21, 2012, you'll have 3 years of bomb shelter making experience under your belt. You'll be way ahead of the game!

Green Tip #42: Short Hair

Okay, you're about to read something that's never been done before. I am going to use math to prove why one fashion style is the best one. After you read this, you'd better make an appointment at your barber shop, because everyone's going to be rushing out to follow this hot new trend.

As you can tell from the title, I'm about to show you the benefits of having short hair. It's about to get all mathematical in the here, so hold on to your logarithms.

Okay, so my first assumption is that there is a linear relationship between the length of the person's hair and the amount of shampoo that they use. Now, there are several factors that interact with this (gender, age, socio-economic status, etc.) but within each demographic subgroup of the population, I feel confident making this assumption. Also, it may stop being linear beyond certain extremes, such as when a person has really really short hair or really really long hair. In the tail ends of the hair length distribution, the relationship may be more exponential or perhaps logarithmic.

That being said, I can further conclude that a person with half the hair length will use half the volume of shampoo. Again, there are complicating factors to this, such as a person with short hair will wash their hair less often, and therefore use less than half of the volume of shampoo, but we'll ignore that for this calculation. If anything, this assumption will only make my conclusions less conclusive, so if I can prove the environmental benefits with this assumption in place, I can say that the conclusions will hold even more so when this assumption is removed.

Now let's gather some figures. According to a case study done by the Boston Consulting Group, the average US household uses 19.5 bottles of shampoo per year. That's 19.5 20 oz. bottles, or 390 oz. per household. And, according to the 2007 US Census Bureau report, there are approximately 111,162,259 households. That means the US uses 43,353,281,010 oz. of shampoo per year. That comes out to 338,697,508 gallons of shampoo per year. And according to an article on Newsweek, up to 80 % of shampoo is water. That means the US shampoo industry uses about 270,958,000 gallons of water per year. That's roughly the amount of water that one person uses in 9279 years.

What if we were able to cut that in half? Think of all the water we'd save! How do we do that, you might ask? Well, Green Tip #42 is this: Cut Your Hair Length in Half. Yes, I know this means short hair will be popular among women because of this, but I should put the needs of the environment before my personal preferences.

Also, I didn't factor in the amount of conditioner or anything like that. Also, we'll save electricity by cutting down on hair dryer use. But that's just icing on the cake when it comes to how much water will be saved.

Now, there are two notable exceptions to this rule. Bald people, there's nothing you can really do to help the cause here. Kudos on being ahead of the game though. Just make sure you keep that head wax use to a minimum. And hippies, I understand you like your long hair. But odds are you either have dreadlocks (Nasty, but Saves Water!) or you just simply don't shower. Either way, you can ignore the above Green Tip. I think you've done enough for the environment.

Green Tip #41: 5 Reasons Facebook is Good For the Environment

Ah, yes... Good ol' Facebook. Never before have I seen a website that has gained so much negative press and yet has become an integral part almost everyone's lives that have signed up for it. And although Facebook might have attracted negative attention for needlessly changing layouts and stealing private information and causing lower grades among college students, I'd like to talk about 5 reasons why Facebook is ultimately good for the environment. I know, it might seem like a shameless way to promote the all new Impractical Green Resource Facebook Page and the reason for that is it is a shameless promotion for it. No seriously, check it out. Search for Impractical Green Resource on Facebook. After you're done reading this Green Tip, of course...

Anyway...

5 Reasons Why Facebook is Good For the Environment:

1) It Saves Transportation Costs
Think back to a time pre-2004 (when Facebook launched). Ah yes, I remember it like it was just yesterday. So let's say you hadn't seen a friend in a while. What's the first thing that you'd want to do? Well, back then, you'd call them up or send them an IM (not a text) and ask if they'd want to get together and get coffee or play a game or something. Fast forward 5ish years to today and now, instead of driving your car to their place or the coffee shop, all you have to do is hop on your computer (not literally) and invite them to play a game of Bowling Buddies or Lexulous. Saves both of you gas and you can still get that fix for social interaction that all of need from time to time.

2) It Saves Paper
Actually, this one is sort of funny, because I literally just did this which gave me the idea for this point. One of my friends has a birthday today (Happy Birthday Kristyn!) and instead of wasting a perfectly good tree to get her a card, I just posted a message on her wall. There's no way I can be considered cheap or inconsiderate for not getting her a card; I wrote on her wall, after all! Similarly, if you're really cheap, you can get them a Facebook gift, which uses no natural resources at all! Yay for celebrating Green birthdays!

3) It Reduces Propellant Use
Now, I am aware that aerosol spray cans phased out CFC's around 20 years ago, so there should be no worries about spray paint adding to the hole in the ozone layer (what ever happened to that, by the way? I can only assume it's gotten better or we'd still be hearing about that). But I also know that spray paint uses chemicals which really shouldn't be ending up in runoff into our streams and lakes. Well, now that Facebook is around, those of you with uncontrollable urges to graffiti things now have an environmentally (and criminally) safe way to vent your desires. You can write on people's walls! Think about what that literally means. Write. On. Their. Walls. Now, if I went to my friend's apartment and started writing on their walls with spray paint, they'd be pretty darn mad at me. And probably un-friend me on Facebook.

4) It Teaches Us About Caring For the Environment
Farmville. I can't say I use it, but I do know it's popular to a lot of people. Great job, Facebook! If the people that are addicted to Farmville are as addicted as I gather they are, it's only a matter of time until they start planting trees and vegetables in their own yards, thinking that they're still playing the game. More trees = less CO2 in the atmosphere, and that's really what we're going for with the Green Movement. And finally...

5) It Saves Ink
Ah, yes... (I already said that...) One of the things that Facebook is especially known for is the embarrassing pictures of drunken parties that end up being posted there. Now, pre-Facebook, if your friend, co-worker, significant other, brother, sister, mother, grandmother (heaven forbid...) gets drunk and starts making a fool of themselves, you'd take pictures and then have to go get the film developed or the digital photos printed at a store somewhere. Because, you have to show everyone else you know, right? That means multiple copies so everyone can have one. Ugh, that wastes so much paper and printer ink. Isn't is so much more environmentally friendly just to post them on Facebook so everyone else can easily see them? Remember to think of how many trees and... ink... bushes? you'll be saving next time you're uploading pictures of your friend passed out in his or her bathroom.

Well, there you have it. Facebook is pretty darn good for the environment. Who knew? With your new-found appreciation for the site, I'd suggest you go check it out. I'd start by searching for Impractical Green Resource. Become a fan, of course!