Waste not, want not

Here’s an concept that is a particular instance of a more general idea I’ve had for a while:

Another use of a free, wasted byproduct to generate electricity is piezo-electric energy. “Piezo” means pressure. Anything that produces pressure can produce energy.
For example, a train station in Japan installed piezo-electric equipment in the ground, so that the foot traffic of those walking through the train station generates electricity (turnstiles at train, subway and ferry stations, ballparks and amusement parks can also generate electricity).

Similarly, all exercise machines at the gym or at home can be hooked up to produce electricity.

But perhaps the greatest untapped sources of piezo-electric energy are freeways and busy roads. If piezo-electric mats were installed under the busiest sections [a little ways under the surface], the thousands of tons of vehicles passing over each day would generate massive amounts of electricity for the city’s use.

For me, the idea came to me when I was waiting for a Red Line subway car, and noticing not for the first time that well be for the “train approaching” announcement, you could feel the build in air pressure of the approaching train. This got me thinking about all manner of ambient energy we fail to capture as we create all kinds of mechanical systems. While it’s probably the weight of the train, not the wind it creates, where the real energy capture opportunities lie, the general concept holds. As we create mechanical systems, we ought to be giving thought to where energy can be captured, stored and recycled back into the system. Some will not be economically feasible, but I suspect many will be.

Remaking a life

For Sale

My family is fast approaching an inflection point, at which we will remake our lives as radically as we have at any moment since we welcomed our son Daniel into our lives. As I’ve written about before, as much as I love our house and our life in it, we have been planning a move for the last eight months or so, and it’s now more or less down to finding the right house.

I love the house we are in–it’s old and unassuming, but in nice shape and uses its space well. It has a great back yard, big and private. It also consumes a modest amount of our income, which has allowed my wife to stop working for our kids’ early years and through my son’s major illness. The house is within walking distance of the train, which means I rarely drive during the week.

Without dwelling on the reasons, the declining school system, lack of community support (and lack of Jewish community) and the one bathroom in the house all add up to a compelling need to make a change in our lives, and we are fortunate to have the opportunity to do so.

We’ve been looking one town over, a town with a truly outstanding school system, and an active Jewish community where we already have several friends. We spent an absolutely delightful day in the town, visiting the lake in town with one couple in the afternoon and grilling out with another couple in the evening. Both couples have kids the same age as ours, and our kids had a blast playing with them.

The drawbacks to the town include that it is an old resort town, and so fairly spread out, meaning nearly all house locations are a 5-10 minute drive from anywhere else. Also, the houses are also divided between very modest converted summer cottages/small capes and a collection of enclaves of McMansions, with very little in between.

I don’t think we have the resources or the stomach to buy on the modest side and add on, so my suspicion is that we will end up finding something on the low end of the upper group, a newer colonial that hopefully isn’t too big or too far from the train, stores and the town center.

Still, I have concerns about that choice because it seems like a step in the direction of consuming more, owning more. I’m concerned the buy will use up a greater percentage of our income, it will put us in a community too focused on consumer culture, it will put me in a car on a daily basis.

All of the above are manageable I think, and worth it to give my family the education and the community that are lacking right now, but it will be a challenge to live as simply as we have in the past, to live up to the challenge I have set for myself in this blog.

Reflections on the Supreme Court’s decision

This morning, I find myself far more concerned about the implications of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on corporate money in campaign finance than I am about the Massachusetts Senate election.  In yet another damaging blow from the Bush administration, Bush appointees have tipped the scales just enough to overturn decades of limits on the money corporations can spend in elections, and now the gloves are off.

The new power of corporations to influence the election of national and local politicians, judges, and other officials is staggering, and extremely dangerous to the environment, consumer health and safety, and any other cause that corporations find inconvenient in their search for profits.  The results of the financial industry’s long campaign for deregulation may seem quaint compared to the catastrophes that might arise as a consequence of this decision.

I don’t think it will take too long for the public to recognize the poisonous effect this will have on the political system, but it will take years to correct it.  I feel like we’ve entered a whole new era of personal responsibility for consumer choices as the only effective curb on corporate behavior is consumers who choose not to do business with companies behaving unethically.  We need to be increasingly aware of who we are in bed with, and what they are doing with the money they give us.  We need strong transparency requirements attached to corporate campaign spending, distributed in a manner that supports ethical consumer choice.

More than ever, I feel the weight of the political in every purchase.

Power of consumer choice

The green tissues

A small example of the power of consumer choice:  I work in a fairly environmentally conscious office (as you might expect from the People’s Republic of Cambridge).  I went to the office supply cabinet yesterday to prepare for the impending cold and flu season, and found the standard issue tissues we ususally have replaced by a green-branded version.

It’s a small thing, but I think major suppliers like Office Depot tend to be more sensitive, as once a product like this makes it onto the order sheet, it tends to stay there long term. They at least recognise the value in marketing green.  How green the product really is is another question.

The back of the box

It bills itself as 100% recycled (80% post consumer) and bleached using a non-chlorine process.  Seems reasonable to expect that it is.  So a small example and more properly a B-to-B example, but an illustration of how choices in consumption can change the practice, and more importantly the thinking of producers.

Starting from home

Our home

I love our house.  My wife feels somewhat more ambivalent about it, especially in winter, but I love the house.  It’s not large, or new, or particularly well-appointed.  It’s a solid structure, though, well built for its or any other era and big enough for our four-person family, or at least nearly so.

It was built in 1895, a modified Homestead-style house with an economy to its use of space you don’t see in many homes.  Three bedrooms, one bath (the biggest flaw), a living room, dining room, and roomy—if oddly arranged—kitchen.  We’ve partially refinished the basement, and there is also a finished room in the attic which we use as an office and guest room.

It sits on a plot of just under a quarter of an acre near the center of a solidly middle class eastern Massachusetts town, a typically New England suburban setting.  The back yard is spacious for the area, a seventy by seventy foot square surrounded by a six foot picket fence and shaded by a half-dozen Norwegian maple border trees.  In the summers, the kids can play in the yard while my wife or I work in the house, despite the fact that we live on a fairly busy street.  Its a great place for cookouts and tossing a baseball around, a mostly green expanse with a picnic table, a shed, a hammock and a garden.

We’ll likely move out of this house in a year or two for reasons extrinsic to the structure itself (other than the single bathroom issue), but I’m starting this exploration of sustainable living with the house because houses sit so much at the center of our lifestyles and impact greatly the subsequent choice we make in living out our lives.  I’m sure that I’ll have ample opportunity to explore choices we’ve made that are less sustainable in many dimensions, but at least with the house I can start with a few choices I am pleased with.

This house is our first, and when we set out to buy it, we took a map of the Boston area and highlighted the commuter rail lines, because one of my criteria was that I wanted to be able to walk to the train station.  We are five minutes from the nearest station, and while I do still sometimes drive into Cambridge for my job, most often I go the entire work week without getting into my car.  When we bought the house in 2001, I remember thinking if there ever were to be an oil shock, at least we wouldn’t have high gas bills.  I also remember thinking an oil shock wasn’t likely to happen for a few decades.

We’ve worked hard to make the house more efficient as well, insulating the attic, replacing the furnace and water heater, relining the chimney.  We converted from oil heat to natural gas.  We’ve made some cosmetic improvements as well, replacing ceilings downstairs, repairing cracked plaster walls.  We’ve repainted the outside to its current yellow.  In all, the house is great shape, though the roof will likely not last much longer.

At the time we bought the house, I was just starting my career and not making a lot of money.  My wife, a middle school and college teacher, was further along career-wise and had a job at Northeastern University.  The house was probably as much as we could afford at the time, but we also could have reasonably expected to be making more money in the ensuing years, and bought a bigger house.  As it turns out, buying the house we did has kept our mortgage payments relatively low, meaning we devote less as a percentage of our income to covering housing costs than do many people I know.

This points to an important theme I hope to explore further in coming posts: The impacts of economic choices on personal freedom.  A relatively low cost of housing has allowed us over the past eight years to have a relative level of freedom in making personal choices, and of all the lifestyle choices we have made, I cannot think of a single other one that has had as profound an effect on our happiness as a family.

At every turn in making choices for our family, we have had more options because of the economic effects of this housing choice.  When we had children, we had more options available to us regarding how much we chose to work, what daycares we could afford for our children and how much they would be in daycare.  We have had the opportunity to travel more than we otherwise might.  And in 2006, when my son was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, we were able to live on my income alone while my wife stopped working to care for him. (He is completely recovered and my wife is starting work again.)

This one insight is a foundation for me.  I think it’s often assumed that more possessions means more happiness, and perhaps in an environment of unlimited money this may be true.  But in living with limited resources, less stuff (in this case less house) can mean more freedom.  Living better can defined as having more things, but having more things is ultimately unsustainable, so to live sustainably implies a lower quality of life.  A key to living better with less is to begin to redefine our understanding of better living, defining quality of life not in terms of possessions, but in terms of freedoms.  That is one important goal of this blog.