Trouble with reducing water usage in our toilet

We moved to a rental house recently, and the toilet (just one bathroom) we got was put into the house in 1990. Therefore, it uses 3.5 gallons per flush. Obviously, a no-brainer to replace it with something better.

Instead of completely ripping out the toilet and replacing it, and sending the old toilet to the landfill, we looked at an alternative option.

There are now products on the market that will reduce your water amount per flush without buying a new one, and give you an option for a partial flush.

I purchased the One2flush 200 Dual Flush Retrofit Kit, and planned to reduce my usage to something similar to a 1.3 - 1.6 gallons per flush level, plus have the option to use the low flush option (for liquids).

When I went to install the product, I had problems getting the wing nuts off the back of the toilet, that connects the tank to the bowl. It must have rusted or sealed on there tight, as I spend almost 2 hours trying to get them off. I got one off finally, and tried to loosen the other by pulling and lifting on the tank.

As expected, I cracked the tank. So much for a zero waste solution!

Now I still had a bolt attached to the bowl, and a broken tank. I checked the local Restore, but they only sold toilets as one piece, not the tank or bowl separately. Since we only have one bathroom, I was in a time crunch to get it repaired. The next best option was to buy a new toilet tank.

The new tank was rated for 1.6 gallons per flush, which is better than what we had, but unfortunately, they didn't sell the 1.28 gpf model as a stand-alone option. Only in the full kit version. Which brings me to a quick rant: Why can't you buy each piece individually? There are pieces you should be able to save (lid, base bowl, plunger, water tubes, etc), so it seems wasteful to have to replace every piece of the toilet.

I finally got the retrofit dual-flush kit installed, which was pretty simple to install. There is some adjustment you'll need to make on the different flush levels, but the option to adjust it is nice to have.

Overall, I ended up with a better solution.

Toilet before, each flush = 3.5 gpf
Toilet after, each flush = 1.6 gpf for full, and approx 0.75-1.0 gpf for half flush

I wish I wouldn't have broken the tank, but this is just another example of why it can be tough to do the right thing. I hope my experiences give people some reminders to keep plugging along with your eco-friendly lifestyle, even when things go wrong, and you end up making a worse impact on the environment than you intended.

Kinnick Stadium recycling needs a boost

While watching my Iowa Hawkeyes finish off an incredible football season, I began to think about how much trash gets generated at a sporting event. Although I realize that the 70,000 people who attend the games were probably going to generate "some" amount of trash that day, even if they didn't go to a game, there is still a lot that a university can do to minimize the amount of trash they create, and what happens to it after the game is over.

While in high school in Iowa City, all fall sports athletes were required to arrive at 7am on Sunday morning to clean the stadium after a home game. The university donated the money we raised to the athletic programs of each high school. If enough people showed up (usually 200-500 people), it could be fully cleaned in under 2 hours. It's a win-win for all parties!

I started thinking back to those days, and how the process worked, so I decided to check to see if things have changed much since I last participated.



When we arrived, we were happy to see that they were handing out special bags just for bottles. However, instead of using paper cups and dispensing soda from the fountain machine, they seemed to have gone with plastic bottles as the primary source of soda. The number of bottles was unbelievable, so it's no wonder why bottle recycling was being promoted. There were plastic bottle recycling setup around the stadium, so that was a positive. However, right next to that was a trash can, where many of the bottles ended up, unfortunately.

During the cleanup process, the trash is swept into the aisle, and then forced into a trash bag. Even with people walking around looking for bottles, there were many of them that still ended up in the trash. Everyone is trying to get the job done, and aren't spending a lot of time looking to see what can be pulled out for recycling.



The other surprise was the amount of aluminum cans that were present. First of all, these items are not actually sold in the stadium, so they must be "smuggled" in by the fans. What is amazing is that Iowa has a 5 cent deposit on aluminum cans, so the fact that no one had picked up these cans yet was hard to believe. I bet there was $20 worth of aluminum cans laying around. If you want to make some quick money, hang out after the next Iowa game next fall.

Here is a picture of the main items that were left behind after the game.



In summary, there were:

• Plastic Bottles (soda, sports drinks and water)
  
• Aluminum Cans (soda and beer)
  
• Plastic bags (peanuts, hot dog wrappers)
  
• Plastic containers (nachos, coffee lids, special drink cups)
  
• Newspaper/Paper products (game programs, drinks/coffee, popcorn, fries, plates)
  
• Food waste/organics (pretzels, pizza crusts, peanut shells)
  
• Cardboard (coffee holders, carrying trays)
  

So what do I plan to recommend, and help implement at Kinnick Stadium next year? A three pronged attack is probably the best option.

1. Reduce the amount of trash - push for items with less packaging, or packaging with a higher recycled content (or maybe more biodegradable material).
   
2. Reuse containers more than once - make it an incentive to reuse their commemorative cups each game, or provide reusable carrying trays (not disposable).
   
3. Recycle as much as possible - which items can be recycled, that aren't being done today, and setup a simple process for the fans and cleanup crew.
   

I'll keep you posted on my efforts. Next time you're at a sporting event, look around and see what improvements can be made to make recycling easier, and let the team know about it!

Depressing trip to the landfill

As part of my company's ISO-14001 team, we took a tour of the local landfill. If you've never been to a landfill, you need to go. It will inspire you to do way more recycling than you do now! Most of them will give you free tours, since they realize the importance of public education. In fact, take the whole family, and you'll see how quickly you can change their behavior!



On the downside, it was pretty depressing to see all the trucks constantly dump loads of waste all day long. One after another. The worst part is that many of the items being dumped could have been recycled (cardboard, wood, fabric, plastic bottles and jugs, paper, etc). But once it leaves the truck, it's against the law to grab the item (for safety reasons), so we saw piles of items that you wanted to go grab and place in the recycling bins, but we couldn't.



If I ran the landfill, I would require every truck to empty its contents, and sort out the recyclable items from the waste, before it ever goes up to the hill. Why do we expect the citizens to know all the rules? Why would they blindly allow people to dump items without any inspection or checks? With the constant updates in what can and cannot be recycled (which also seems to be unclear whomever I ask), educating the public will always be way too costly and too much "after the fact" to make any immediate impact. Spend that money and effort at the last line of defense, and use that information to flow back to the truck drivers and citizens with hard facts.

I realize there would be a lot of extra labor involved, but what about the cost of land for burying stuff we don't need to throw away, and having to buy more land a lot sooner, as a result of this lack of "inspection". If you consider any recyclable item that is dumped as an error or "escape", then common thought is that you go to the prior step and setup an inspection, until you eventually trace back to the source of the "error". Yes, public education is the ultimate scenario we should strive for, where no one throws away anything unless it cannot be recycled. In the meantime, you should manually sort out what doesn't belong until that time comes.

That brings me to the really depressing part. Once an item is dumped, it gets covered and all liquid is eventually extracted from underneath the trash. The hill is covered in a layer of material that prevents any moisture from entering. Basically, it's sealed up tight, and nothing gets in or out.



This is a problem because nothing will degrade or compost in those conditions. Biodegradable materials require water, heat and oxygen in order to break down, which they will not get inside the landfill (at least not enough before its covered forever).

BOTTOM LINE: Don't bother buying biodegradable materials unless you are going to compost them yourselves, or take them somewhere that will compost them for you (which is rare to find for most people)!

Here is some more information on biodegradable materials

P.S. This isn't a rant against my local landfill. They do use the methane to generate electricity, and the people there are passionate about recycling and reducing waste, and were just as upset about the situation as we were. I'm just ranting at the whole broken process...

Training people on Going Green

I work at a large company that has 20,000 employees worldwide, however, there has not been any environmental training on what they can do to 'go green' while at work. It seems like such an obvious thing to do: train your employees to take simple steps to reduce their impact on the environment. The training is pretty simple, and the potential business impact is enormous.

What we concluded was that there wasn't any off-the-shelf training that could be easily and quickly deployed, so we decided to make one available, for free, on our website.

http://www.helpsaveearth.org/free_going_green_work_training.asp

We feel that if people are trained at work (where they have a captive audience and reporting hierarchy), we can make a bigger impact on communicating these simple steps, rather than trying to communicate to the masses using numerous methods, with varying amounts of detail and explanation. The viral effect within a work environment are much stronger than in real life. For example, it just takes one manager of 100 people to email a green presentation, and require that their direct reports watch it. They are essentially being paid to watch it, and they will because their boss asked them to. In the real world, your friend might email you the same presentation, but what motivation is there to watch it?

We also feel that once people start taking simple steps at work, it will quickly transfer to the home, and they will look for ways to save at home.