The White Hat Environmental Sustainability Newsletter

Archived Newsletter - 30th April 2009

Contents

Why this newsletter?
Electricity
Known Unkowns - Long Life Light Bulbs
Storage of electricity
Solar Energy
Bicycles & energy storage
Batteries
What if Everyone Did It?
Recycling & Downcycling
Use Energy, Get Rich & Save the Planet
Electricity - action at a distance
Is this newsletter 'green'?
Great Moments in Marketing
Drying clothes
Computers
Wasted energy
From the White Hat Inbox
Death of an environmentalist
Domestic appliances
Rightsizing
Making a change
The White Hat Environment Quiz

Why this newsletter?

There is already a ton of stuff out there about environmental sustainability, so why should White Hat add more to this growing pile? Well I suppose our reasons were tied up with the thoughts of a great philosopher of recent years who told us there were:

Known Knowns: White Hat will tell you what it knows about what it knows and that will make us feel holier than thou which is a good thing and known as justifiable pride.

Known Unknowns: What Hat will tell you what it knows about what it doesn’t know and that will allow you to enlighten us and then you will feel holier than us which is a bad thing and known as hubris.

Unknown Knowns: Sometimes we know stuff – daggy stuff our parents did – which we didn’t realise was good for environmental sustainability until we later figured it out. White Hat will share with you what it didn’t know that it already knew. Of course we have to give these activities different labels and motivations from our parents because one of the reasons for being interested in the environment is to be holier than your parents.

Unknown Unknowns: Below is a list of what White Hat doesn’t know that it doesn’t know:

I’m sure that you will help us fill it in.

But we might be so bold as to add one further category to the previous four suggested by the great philosopher.

Half-known Half-knowns: The area of environmental sustainability seems to become more and more opaque as certain governments urge individuals to tokenistic acts “because every little bit counts” in order to mask that the big things are still not being done, when well-meaning activists cling to simplistic mantras and slogans to solve complex problems, journalists with a content-free education who realise that in the Australian media an uniformed voxpop is given 4 times the value of rigorous research, and certain businesses and marketers who attempt to confuse the issue by ‘greenwashing’ their products or services. Well never fear, White Hat is here to sort out this confusion of these half-known half-knowns.

Well no we won’t actually but we will ask numbers of questions and you can give us some of the answers and in the end we might all know a little more.

Electricity

Electricity. Great stuff! You flick a switch and something happens. It replaced all sorts of dirty, smelly, inconvenient, inefficient, clumsy, polluting contraptions that were part of the home and the workplace in the 19th century.

But it has its problems – and opportunities. We thought we might us this newsletter to discuss some aspects of electricity.

In future newsletters we will discuss:

• Food and environmental sustainability
• House & community design and environmental sustainability
• Other topics suggested by you

Known Unknowns - long life light bulbs

This section of the newsletter has been moved to The White Hat Guide to Recycling & Downcycling.

Storage of Electricity

This section of the newsletter has been moved to The White Hat Guide to Electricity & Environmental Sustainability.

Solar Energy

This section of the newsletter has been moved to The White Hat Guide to Electricity & Environmental Sustainability.

Bicycles & energy storage

When it comes to converting human energy into propulsion, the bicycle is possible the most efficient machine invented by man – part of the time. Then when it comes to storing the unused energy its efficiency is 0%.

Electric and hybrid-electric vehicles generally use ‘regenerative braking’ to store energy for later use. An electric tram or train will usually pump the energy back into the overhead wires while smaller electric transport right down to the personal transporter of a Segway which is smaller than a bicycle will store the energy in a battery. Now the storage process is highly inefficient but seems better than the option of not storing it at all. The standard bicycle throws away its braking energy as heat. If you live at the top of a hill and ride to work, none of that additional energy that was thrown away can be used to help you back up the hill at the end of the day and it is this inefficiency that rules the bicycle out for many people for numbers of everyday work and domestic tasks.

The bicycles of a generation ago powered their lights with a ‘dynamo’ but even this has gone and cyclists use battery powered lights. Maybe if the wasted energy of the bicycle can’t be re-used for propulsion it could be used to recharge batteries for the mobile phone. The technology is there.

Recently at Federation Square there was a worthwhile awareness-raising exercise whereby a set of 20-odd bicycles were connected to generators. Over the week, workplace teams were invited to come and compete against each other and in the end the energy would be used to power a one hour popular music concert with its amplification and lighting. What I found interesting was that after a week of sweat and exertion I believe the one hour concert still had an energy deficit. Maybe when our parents and grandparents sat in their turtle neck sweaters in coffee shops listening to acoustic music by candlelight they were doing more for environmental sustainability than those of us who enjoy going to high energy rock concerts.

You can find more information on alternative energy vehicles and bicycle power in a previous White Hat Inventions Newsletter.

Batteries

This section of the newsletter has been moved to The White Hat Guide to Recycling & Downcycling.

What if everyone did it?

I had an elderly relative in Sydney who had various sources of ‘free’ energy. Some of them were even legal. For instance, clamped between the troughs she had a small mechanical spin-dryer which operated by water power. You attached the hose to the tap and the mechanism focused a strong flow of water onto the blades underneath causing the dryer to run a speed with sufficient speed to impress a seven year old child. Water cost next to nothing because there was a single water rate charge related to the value of your property rather than the amount used. And she was getting the power to run the spin-dryer for free.”If that power is there for free, how come everyone doesn’t use it?” I asked. (I knew not to ask such things when her gasfitter nephew came around to do strange things with the gas meter, but in this case it seemed a reasonable question.) “Because they’re not as smart as your old aunty!”

Through my childhood I was vaguely troubled by this. There were plenty of people out there as smart as my old aunty – not as cunning maybe, but certainly as smart. It wasn’t until I was older that I realised the problem was the ‘what if everyone did it factor’ or what scientists, mathematicians and engineers call ‘scalability’. The water pressure was being provided by a number of pumping stations and if everyone started drawing energy out of the system the flow would stop to a dribble and you have to put in larger pumping stations and heavier pipes which all have to be paid for somehow so that people can get ‘free’ energy. In fact, before long you’ve produced the ‘Hydraulic Service Power Company’. More about that in a coming newsletter.

When I attend sustainability and lifestyle fairs I see a number of products and services that don’t pass the ‘what if everyone did it’ test. When I ask about scalability a puzzled look usually comes over the face of the sales person but the response usually roughly translates as “that’s not going to happen because they’re not as smart as your old aunty.”

Meanwhile I sometimes wonder about ‘renewable’ energies such as solar, wind, tidal, wave and hot rocks. We are told they are renewable and have no side effects. I still want to ask the ‘what if everyone did it?’ question. It seems likely they would have far less side effects than current methods but it seems worth investigating and planning for the side effects rather than simply chanting the mantra that they are endlessly renewable and cause no environmental damage.

Recycling & Downcycling

This section of the newsletter has been moved to The White Hat Guide to Recycling & Downcycling.

Use Energy, Get  Rich and Save the  Planet

You might find the article in The New York Times with the above title a useful conversation starter next time a group of you talking about the environment.

Electricity - action at a distance

This section of the newsletter has been moved to The White Hat Guide to Electricity & Environmental Sustainability.

Is this newsletter green?

As we stated in a newsletter six years ago: “We live in a wide brown land on the driest continent on earth. We have always regarded the adopting of the term "green" to indicate environmentally responsible as particularly mindless. In many parts of Australia where you see large areas of green, you know that it is probably the result of unsustainable practices.”

So, no, you won’t find us using the word ‘green’ to indicate environmentally responsible. Nor are we likely to discard our plain shopping bags for ones that have had their carbon footprint increased by using a (often toxic) green dye. It does mean that we are often rejected for not using the prescribed tribal language or tribal markings but that is part of the price you pay for being Independent and (occasionally) Irreverent.

Great Moments in Marketing

“Johnny, I’ve got a great new product for us.”
“What’s dat Lenny?”
“Well you know how the household clothes dryer is the most energy-hungry appliance in the house? Well, we use wind power and solar power to drive it.”
“But Lenny, a small wind turbine requires a big pole and a solid base.”
“I’ve got that covered Johhny. Most Australian homes have a Hills Hoist. You take out a few of the struts and mount the turbine on the top.”
“And what about the solar power Lenny?”
“I’ve got that covered too Johnny. You take the wires out of the Hills Hoist and mount some solar panels and you can rotate it to the exact angle.”
“And will that produce enough power to run de clothes dryer Lenny?”
“Well about 30% of it but every little bit counts.”
“Dey’ll never buy it Lenny.”
“Trust me, Johnny, they will. We’ll run daytime television ads saying use the power of the sun and the wind to dry your clothes’.”

Drying clothes

On winter days when the clothes line is not an option we hang bulky items like towels to drip and dry over the bath before we leave home in the morning. In the evening they are still damp to the touch but only take a fraction of the time to freshen up in the dryer.

Computers

Computers are one of the inventions of recent times which have enormous potential to save lots of energy. Let’s take an example. Each week we send out a newsletter to 10,000 people. It’s ostensibly about what’s on in Melbourne but it ranges far and wide and about 10% of our subscribers are from overseas. A generation ago that would have involved chopping down numbers of trees, turning them into paper (very greedy on water) printing (with possibly a lead-based ink), placing in envelopes and creating lots of greenhouse gases by having to transport those physical newsletters to all parts of the globe. We could possibly improve things slightly by using downcycled paper. Now, we just press a button and they are sent electronically. That doesn’t mean there are no carbon overheads, but they are dramatically fewer.

However computers use electricity and some are more efficient than others. Currently at White Hat we use a laptop computer because its energy use is much lower than the equivalent desktop PC. However a laptop requires a different style of construction and may well involve more polluting materials. Quite frankly, we don’t know. Reliable sources of this sort of information (as distinct from marketing claims) are very hard to track down. If any of you can help, please let us know. Are we simply saving some energy now at the expense of the whole-of-life environmental impact of using a laptop rather then a desktop PC?

Wasted Energy

This section of the newsletter has been moved to The White Hat Guide to Electricity & Environmental Sustainability.

From the White Hat Inbox

We had the following interchange of text messages:

“hi from portc. joshs mums bf who owns the house had the ceilings redone & crystal & i told him 2 put in low voltage lighting to save nrg”

“Nat, rememeber your science classes. Low voltage does not necessarily mean low energy.”

“we never took much notice in science classes cos its sooo irrelevant & we wanted 2 save the environment”

“Nat, turn the lights on then after a while get up in the ceiling. Each of those lights probably has its own transformer sitting on the beams which will be hot to the touch. Most of the energy is being wasted as heat.”

“crystal & i got in2 the ceiling & weve never been anywhere like that b4 and crystal put her foot through the plaster and we tried to patch it up but we think joshs mums bf will notice and those black box thingies were real hot”

“Tell Josh’s mum’s boyfriend to get into the ceiling and make sure there is no insulation or debris in contact with the transformers because they can catch alight and cause a fire.”

“joshs mums bf chucked a wobbly about the hole in the ceiling – he can b sooo unreasonable - & i sed i could make it up cos if hes got another work function where he cant b seen with joshs mum i could go again & look like his gf cos he sed i scrubbed up real well but joshs mum sed she thought that wouldnt b necessary & he brought home a disposable white plastic suit from work with a hood & a facemask & i told joshs mum he looked like a sperm & she sed he couldnt cos hed had a vasectomy & he went in2 the ceiling & fixed up the stuff & it was so cold i had 2 switch on the heating and there were all those black box thingies on the other side of the insulation wasting their heat. sometimes it make u think”

Death of an Environmentalist

Richard Pratt died this week. When his reputation was at its peak we referred to him as the ‘Recycling King’. Then he ran into some problems regarding his business practices so we called him the ‘Packaging Magnate’. However that should not blind us to the fact that he was prepared to stump up many millions of his own dollars in an attempt to save the Murray-Darling but in the end had to give up because most politicians couldn’t see what was in it for them at the time.

However, he is also worth remembering as a pioneer of highly efficient energy use in factories. In the Visy recycling plants great attention was given to how any ‘waste’ energy produced by one process could be used to assist some other process. The result was that some of the best plants were virtually self-sufficient in energy.

We don’t pretend to know the details and rights and wrongs of your business practices but for your pioneering work in environmental issues we say – Thank You Dick.

Domestic Appliances

This section of the newsletter has been moved to The White Hat Guide to Electricity & Environmental Sustainability.

Rightsizing

This section of the newsletter has been moved to The White Hat Guide to Electricity & Environmental Sustainability.

Making a Change

Here at White Hat we try to do our bit to make changes that will benefit the environment. We do this by however imperfectly, attempting make changes at the personal level, attempting to generate change at the community level and at the political level. It’s not something we would describe ourselves as being ‘passionate’ about – there are other things we are passionate about. It’s just that we live in the 21st century and its one of the things you have to do. We realise we have numbers of loyal readers who are in significant decision making positions and for that reason we will keep asking the questions and attempting to give some useful answers from time to time.

We don’t know how successful we’ll be, but we will attempt to encourage readers to be:

1. Intelligent – Five years ago it was common to see passionate young people at environmental rallies, many of them carrying bottled water which had been transported half way across the continent or the world together with its major carbon footprint. They weren’t being hypocritical. They happened to go through a schooling system at a time when mathematics and the hard sciences had been downgraded and questions like “what do you see when you think it through logically?” were replaced with “express how you feel about what you’ve just been told”. When eventually someone thought to suggest to them to think through the implications of shipping bottled water all over the place, most discarded it. In this newsletter we hope to pose a few “think it through” situations.
2. Informed – If we are informed it is easier to go the body corporate and say “if we installed tri-generation it would pay for itself in five years and after that we’d all be laughing as well as contributing to environmental sustainability”. If we are informed we can educate our fellow ratepayers, go to council meetings and lobby for a report to be written by the city engineer as to what obstructions, if any, prevent implementing a Woking-style energy solution which would save people money and substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rather than putting up a few highly visible solar panels on the roof of the council chambers which with our cloud cover will produce two-thirds of five-eights of . .” Well we suggest you go away and do the maths and present it to council. That way they will have to publicly respond and if you are informed they can’t fob you off with technicalities. We hope to do our little bit to keep you informed and expect you to tell us when we are uniformed or (more dangerously) under-informed.
3. Independent – A number of lobby groups and the occasional political party have as their prime aim the achieving of environmental sustainability. Good stuff. It’s only when you look closer that you find there is whole other list of socio-political agendas that are seen as being ‘part of being interested in the environment’. If that fits your thinking – fine – join up. If not, don’t. You can still be independent and do your bit. Just be prepared like us to cop regular flack like “you can’t possibly be interested in the environment because . . . “ (you fill in the gap). There may be unspoken social pressures. This newsletter will try to stay independent from those organisations which try to bundle unrelated issues with environmental ones.
4. (Occasionally) Irreverent. – We have found that occasional (and hopefully intelligent) humour is one of the best ways of getting under people’s radar and listening to ideas they might not otherwise. Getting up on a soapbox and preaching doesn’t change people’s thinking but simply hardens them in their present ideas. Unless of course you’re a snake oil salesman and there is already more than enough green snake oil out there. Any time you detect us starting to piously preach in this newsletter it is your job to pull the soapbox from under us. Not necessarily because we are wrong but because we are hoping to make a difference, however small, and you can’t achieve that by being holier than thou.

If you don’t find our approach useful, that’s fine – unsubscribe – there are tons of alternatives out there and you are sure to find one better suited to yourself. If you do find it useful, tell a friend.

The White Hat Environment Quiz

Electricity & heat

1. What do batteries have to do with gorillas?
2. If you dragged your refrigerator into the middle of your living room, propped the door wide open and turned it up full blast would the overall temperature of the room go up or down?
3. What Australian outback invention turns heat into cool?
4. Do electric trams and trains use AC or DC power and why?
5. Which type of battery is more efficient? A DC battery or an AC battery?
6. Welders on Railways and tramways sometimes carry a long pole with a hook on the end. What is this for and what sort of welding are they doing?
7. What Australian expression makes reference to the companion animal of the worthy men of the welding profession?

No prizes – just glory and a warm inner glow.