Pictures!

My Balcony. You'll note the view of the dumpster, My grey microcomposter, and a flower pot with some happy seedlings.

My microcomposter with indigestion. Most of the dirt you see is dirt I added to try and capture some microorganisms and insects. I will add holes on the sides this summer and locate the composter on the ground.

Bathroom clothesline

Another view. Note the slant.

My homebrew set in action!

Some equipment, Notably my reclaimed fermenter

Bathroom Clothesline

        I love my bathroom clothesline. It hangs too low, and it makes all of my guests uncomfortable to use the bathroom when they have to bob and weave like boxers just to make it to the toilet. It hangs at an angle, so all my clothes bunch up at one end. My shirts all have lines across the chest because I have yet to get off my ass and go buy clothespins, and so I just drape them across the string. it doesn't even save me that much money. I do my laundry about once every week and a half. When I used the dryer, I would usually fit all my clothes into one load. The total monetary savings per week of using a clothesline is something like $1.25. All of this might sound like enough to make me hate the thing.  But I don't. I love it.
           The dryer in my apartment building has a list of steps for proper use on the coinslot. Step#4 is pay. Step #5 is start the machine and wait for it to beep before removing your clothes. After Step #5, it says, "If you are not content with the dryness of your clothes, repeat steps #4 and 5." Why would they write that? It is called a "dryer" isn't it? Shouldn't I be able to expect my clothes to be dry when they emerge from it? Of course not.  People pay by the load. Someone was scheming.
            Using a clothesline allows me to avoid the aggravation of paying a machine to tumble my clothes around and blow lukewarm air at them, only drying them enough to make me feel it is worthwhile to pay the machine again. I save some money, I save some energy, and I save some aggravation.
    And also, my apartment smells like clean laundry whenever I put my clothes up to dry.

Composter Indigestion

My composter has indigestion. I try to feed it, but it just isn't very hungry! The decomposition rate really hasn't been very impressive, and my compost heap just looks like a mound of disgusting, wilted vegetables. There are a couple reasons for this. 1) Its been cold outside. There really hasn't been much insect activity at all until the last two weeks or so when it began to warm up. For a while, I might as well have been storing my organic waste in the refrigerator. During this time even a larger composter with a bigger community of decomposers would probably slow its rate of decomposition down, because many of the bugs simply wouldn't be active. 2) My composter is on a balcony several floors from the ground. The rate of immigration to my composter has not been as high as I anticipated. I would like to supplement my composter with worms, which would speed the process up, but I haven't found a good source yet. I tried digging, but I didn't have much luck and I didn't want to do too much damage to the esplanade. Furthermore, there is a lot of mold present in the composter. I fear that if I were to dump a colony of worms into it, they might be at risk of some sort of infection. I refuse to have worms shipped to me, so the hunt for local worms will wear on. When I move to my new apartment in May, I will be on the ground floor. I expect the composter to be more successful during the summer and on the ground.

I Just Saw Something Cool

       I have a view of the dumpster in the alley behind my building from the window of my third floor apartment. Today, I saw a man walk past the dumpster in the pouring rain, stop, and take out his cell phone camera. He stood there for several minutes photographing the dumpster. At first it was hard to tell from my window why he had been moved by this seemingly bleak sight, but the wind changed and a star-shaped mylar balloon with "Happy Birthday!" written on it bobbed into sight. Someone had thrown it away before it could even lose it's helium. The sight of it sitting there in the dumpster, blowing in the wind and being pelted by the rain was apparently too much for him to ignore.
     I like this guy's style. It's good to look for beauty in the mundane. Strange as it seems, this man was enriched in some way by his interaction with the balloon in that dumpster. He allowed himself to be enthralled by something simple. He had an open mind. And the best part of it all? That moment of happiness, or depth, or whatever it was didn't cost him a Nickel.

Protip

Sustainability is not just about efficiency and materials. Its about behavior! The hardest part about trying to reduce my impact this semester has been training myself to do little sustainable actions every time. They add up! It helps to make a checklist of things on your door or in a visible place.
Remembering to turn lights off when I leave a room is always the hardest for me. I made the rule for myself that I'm only allowed to have one lightbulb on at a time. This is harder than you might think. It's easy to turn lights off, its harder to make yourself do it every time.

Latent Needs and Consumer Zen

Many environmentalists agree that one of the largest issues facing the natural world is overconsumption by humans. Overconsumption means using resources at a rate such that they will not be available for future generations. In order to understand overconsumption and it's causes, It is necessary to understand a bit of marketing theory.

In marketing, there is a concept called "latent need". The idea is that a good product addresses a "latent need" of the population, or, a need that the population did not know they had before the product and its marketing campaign were released.

The idea might sound silly, but the fact is we are surrounded by products that address these latent needs.

Classic example:
Nobody in developed nations had any need for bottled water until bottled water and its accompanying marketing campaign were released and scared us all away from our tap water.

In the past, fulfillment of latent needs has been considered a driver of a capitalist economy. Americans could take pride in the fact that as consumers, they had more choices than any other country on the planet. Now, we understand that buying unneccessary or inefficient products contributes to global climate change and a number of other serious environmental issues. It is the concept of latent needs that is responsible for us using more than our "one-world" share of resources, because it is responsible for the huge number of useless consumer products that we can choose from.

So: when you think about buying a product, ask yourself if that product needs to exist. Surprisingly often, you will find that the answer is no. If you are buying products that use resources and contribute little or nothing to your well-being, then you are falling into the trap set by marketers, and you are behaving like a "consumer" rather than a "human".

Examples of things that do not need to exist:
Bottled Water
Any clothing with a designer label
Rice Makers
All of those kitchen gadgets that are only applicable for one type of food. (holders for corn on the cob, garlic smashers, containers to hold your avocados in, etc.)
Soda
Styrofoam Cups
Phone Books
Wrist Watches
Glitter
Air Fresheners-especially aerosol ones

Now, more than ever before it is important to realize that consumption is no longer en vogue, it is a plague. We need to learn to be happier with less. Take pleasure in things that do not require resources, and be critical of things that do.

Energy Protip

Whenever you see an object that runs on electricity, imagine a thin line of black smoke trailing out of an exhaust pipe at the back of it.